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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/greekviewoflifeOOdick_1 


of Life 
, By 
G. Lowes Dickinson, MM. A. 
Fellow of King’s College, 


ambridge 


EDUCATIONAL EDITION 


Garden City Noew York 
Doubleday, Doran & Gompany, Inc. 





ALL RIGHTS-RESERVED. PRINTED IN 
THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUN= 
TRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY,N. ¥. 


PREFACE TO THE SEVENTH 
EDITION 


eS preparing this edition for the press I have 
endeavoured to correct any positive mis-state- 
ment of fact. But I have not attempted to correct 
what may be regarded by some critics as an incom- 
pleteness or over-emphasis of statement. This 
objection is likely to be taken in particular to the 
first chapter. Recent research has discovered, or 
brought into new prominence, the tangled mass of 
primitive superstitions which underlay the literary 
and artistic presentation of Greek religion, and 
persisted among the populace throughout the clas- 
sical age. If I had taken all this into account I 
should have had to modify or supplement my state- 
ment, especially with regard to the attitude of the 
Greek towards death; and I should have had con- 
stantly to refer to the historical development of their 
religious conceptions and rituals. But all this, I 
think I may justly say, lies outside the province of 
this book. I have concerned myself to present the 
specific achievement of the Greek spirit, as reflected 
in the works of their most enlightened poets and 
thinkers. That achievement was to humanize bar- 
barism and enlighten superstition. It is the 
resulting point of view that gives a unique value to 
the study of Greek institutions, thought and art; 
Vv 


vi THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


and it is this point of view which I have endeavoured 
in the following pages to introduce to English 
readers unversed in Greek studies. 

I have to thank Miss Jane Harrison, Professor 
Murray, and Mr. J. T. Sheppard for valuable 
criticism and suggestions, which I have incorporated, 
as far as possible, in the text of this edition. 


PREFACE 


HE following pages are intended to serve as a 
general introduction to Greek literature and 
thought, for those, primarily, who do not know 
Greek. Whatever opinions may be held as to the 
value of translations, it seems clear that it is only by 
their means that the majority of modern readers can 
attain to any knowledge of Greek culture; and as I 
believe that culture to be still, as it has been in the 
past, the most valuable element of a liberal educa- 
tion, I have hoped that such an attempt as the 
present to give, with the help of quotations from the 
original authors, some general idea of the Greek 
view of life, will not be regarded as labour thrown 
away. 

It has been essential to my purpose to avoid, as 
far as may be, all controversial matter; and if any 
classical scholar who may come across this volume 
should be inclined to complain of omissions or 
evasions, I would beg him to remember the object of 
the book and to judge it according to its fitness for 
its own end. 

“The Greek View of Life,’ no doubt, is a question- 
begging title, but I believe it to have a quite in- 
telligible meaning; for varied and manifold as the 
phases may be that are presented by the Greek 


civilization, they do nevertheless group themselves 
Vii 


viil THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


about certain main ideas, to be distinguished with 
sufficient clearness from those which have dominated 
other nations. It is these ideas that I have endeav- 
oured to bring into relief; and if I have failed, the 
blame, I submit, must be ascribed rather to myself 
than to the nature of the task I have undertaken. 

For permission to make the extracts from trans- 
lations here printed, my best thanks are due to 
the following authors and publishers :—Professor 
Butcher, Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. E. D. A. Morshead, 
Mr. B. B. Rogers, Dr. Verrall, Mr. A. S. Way, 
Messrs. George Bell and Sons, the Syndics of the 
Cambridge University Press, the Delegates of the 
Clarendon Press, Oxford, Messrs. Macmillan and 
Co., Mr. John Murray, and Messrs. Sampson Low, 
Marston and Co. I have also to thank the Master 
and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford, for permis- 
sion to quote at considerable length from the late 
Professor Jowett’s translations of Plato and Thu- 
cydides. 

Appended is a list of the translations from which 
I have quoted. 


LIST OF TRANSLATIONS USED 


ESCHYLUS (B.C. 525—456). “The House of Atreus” (i.e. 
the “Agamemnon,” “Choephorz” and “Eumenides”), 
translated by E. D. A. MorsHEeap (Warren and Sons). 

The “Eumenides,” translated by Dr.’ VERRALL (Cam- 
bridge, 1885). 


ARISTOPHANES (C. B.C. 444—380). “The Acharnians, the 
Knights and the Birds,” translated by JoHN HooxkHAm 
FrRERE (Morley’s Universal Library, Routledge). 

{Also the “Frogs” and the “Peace” in his Collected 
Works (Pickering) }. 

The “Clouds,” the “Lysistrata” [“Women in Revolt” ], 
the “Peace,” and the “Wasps,” translated by B. B. RocErs. 


ARISTOTLE (B.C. 384—322). The “Ethics,” the “Politics,” 
and the “Rhetoric,” translated by J. E. C. WELLDON (Mac- 
millan and Co.). 


DEMOSTHENES (B.C. 385—322). “Orations,” translated by 
C. R. Kennepy (Bell). 


EURIPIDES (B.C. 410—406). “Tragedies,” translated by A. 
S. Way (Macmillan and Co.). 


HERODOTUS (B.C. 484—425). “The History,” translated by 
S. R. Rawtinson (Murray). 


HOMER. The “Iliad,” translated by Lanc, LEAF AND MYERS; 
the “Odyssey,” translated by BUTCHER AND LANG (Mac- 
millan). Be 


THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


PINDAR (B.C. 522—442). “Odes,” translated by E. MYErs 
(Macmillan and Co.). 


PLATO (B.C. 430—347). The “Dialogues,” translated by B. 


Jowett (Clarendon Press). 
“The Republic,” translated by DaAvirs AND VAUGHAN 


(Macmillan and Co.). 


PLUTARCH. “Lives,” DrypeEn’s translation, edited by A. 
CLoucH (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.). 


SOPHOCLES (BC. 496—406). Edited and Translated by Dr. 
Jess (Cambridge University Press). 


THUCYDIDES (0b. B.C. 471), edited and translated by B. 
Jowett (Clarendon Press). 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER I 


THe GREEK VIEW OF RELIGION . ....« e 


I. 
2. 
3. 


4. 
5. 
6. 


ITFOCUCCOTY Gish) tee sta et tre 1 ce 


Greek Religion an Interpretation of Nature : 


Greek Religion an Interpretation of the 
Passions 


Human 


Greek Religion the Founda of ciety Z 


Religious Festivals 
The Greek Conception of the Relation $f 
the Godsijyoat es isle oh ote kAa ese 


. Divination, Omens, One AVA) Ro 


sacrifice ANG ALOnement 29) dc) le eet ee 


PATIL ANG WEUMISHTOe NE en halhh erie en a ies 
. Mysticism . . 

. The Greek View of NEATH ont a feature Life ‘ 
. Critical and Sceptical Opinion in Greece . 
. Ethical Criticism . 
. Transition to Monotheism .... . 
. Metaphysical Criticism . . aes 
. Metaphysical ai ee ete 
peRUPINALY 346) ala ee a ney A OE ais ts ns 


° ° e e ° 


CHAPTER II 


Tose GREEK: VIEW OF THE STATED. C0 Soh ws 


1, 
. The Relation of the State to the Citizen - 
er tie GEPeK i VIEW IL) bia oo okie env cents 
. Artisans and Slaves . . 
. The Greek State Primarily Military, oar tactistvick , 
. Forms of Government in the Greek State . 


Amn && W HY 


The .Greek State*a “City? 1 26 : 


xi 


Wan to 


THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


7. ‘Faction’ and) Anarchy cu)ciin. Ue aaa gine ee ek ear 
8. Property and the Communistic Ideal . . . . . 
Qo Spartan Po ghlrces fie lie ied ep RaeNG Ahh ont acer noe atic LR 
10. Athens . . i : r WaT at hee 
11. Sceptical Criticism of the Basis of the State Se a eee 
12: Summaryie oie des ten brates ete is Mien. aioe 


CHAPTER IIT 


THe GREEK VIEW OF THE INDIVIDUAL. . . ree kak 
1. The Greek View of Manual Labour and Trade AO Oy, 
. Appreciation of External Goods ..... . 139 
. Appreciation of Physical aA PRAISE ae DRS HWA ES 
. Greek Athletics Kil ae aes 
. Greek Rikicoontdendinentionn of the Esthetic and 
Ethical Points) of; Viswaiss Hale stwe als tia a miraies and ee 
The ,Greek ) View :of) Pleasure yc sus) no ie es ee oD 
. Illustrations—Ischomachus; Socrates . . . . . 158 
. The Greek View of Woman. .. . oe 6S 
. Protests against the Common View of Wann <7 ASL BO 
10,2 Friendship ii) oct tie diet vot ave ait onl Caan a ore Nie Lan eat ay ca aay 
11.) Summary isl te) Gee ya ee ee hace eg aa 


mn & W & 


0 OND 


CHAPTER IV 


THE GREEK VIEW OF ART... Pras hs adm LT he 
1. Greek Art an Expression of National Life writen dee Bes 

2. Identification of the A%sthetic and Ethical Points 
OF VIG We eA Y Re eaidile: Un mere etntniS eur Ri amie eaee 
eculpture and Painting inca c i Sigs o ue) iene eee ae 
{ iusic and the Dance cio. ual conae ateumcraes Pou etn Le 
5 POREEY ie ile ie eiullge Attn old DR TOE An aa aes an ete ge ates ee 
Ih ip 15-0 b PRM Ss Uma a ser Rane ie. (BAS SNR RAE ek 
. Comedy wo pity Lave at ete HRN Sita’ Micon Mt Rae ee a ae a 
é SUTOMALY 4) i5))4e hi. beams ell aise atin, to conc a eae 


Onan kh W 


CHAPTER V 


CONCLUSION (2) S22 UC OM Se A ee iat saree ray a 


INDEX e . e e . e e e . e . e e e e e e 2 59 
xii 


THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


CHAPTER I 


THE GREEK VIEW OF RELIGION 


§ 1. INTRODUCTORY 


N approaching the subject of the religion of the 
Greeks it is necessary to dismiss at the outset 
many of the associations which we are naturally 
inclined to connect with that word. What we com- 
monly have in our mind when we speak of religion is 
a definite set of doctrines, of a more or less meta- 
physical character, formulated in a creed and sup- 
ported by an organization distinct from the state. 
And the first thing we have to learn about the reli- 
gion of the Greeks is that it included nothing of the 
kind. There was no church, there was no creed, 
there were no articles. Priests there were, but they 
were merely public officials, appointed to perform 
certain religious rites. The distinction between 
cleric and layman, as we know it, did not exist; the 
distinction between poetry and dogma did not exist; 
and whatever the religion of the Greeks may have 
been, one thing at any rate is clear, that it was some- 
thing very different from all that we are in the 


habit of associating with the word. 
I 


z THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


What, then, was it? It is easy to reply that 
it was the worship of those gods—of Zeus, Apollo, 
Athene, and the rest—with whose names and his- 
tories everyone is familiar. But the difficulty is to 
realize what was implied in the worship of these 
gods; to understand that the mythology which we 
regard merely as a collection of fables was to the 
Greeks actually true; or at least that to nine Greeks 
out of ten it would never occur that it might be 
false, might be, as we say, mere stories. So that 
though no doubt the histories of the gods were in 
part the inventions of the poets, yet the poets would 
conceive themselves to be merely putting into form 
what they and everyone believed to be essentially 
true. 

But such a belief implies a fundamental distinc- 
tion between the conception, or rather, perhaps, the 
feeling of the Greeks about the world, and our own. 
And it is this feeling that we want to understand 
when we ask ourselves the question, what did a belief 
in the gods really mean to the ancient Greeks? To 
answer it fully and satisfactorily is perhaps impos- 
sible. But some attempt must be made; and it may 
help us in our quest if we endeavour to imagine the 
kind of questionings and doubts which the concep- 
tion of the gods would set at rest. 


§ 2. GREEK RELIGION AN INTERPRETATION OF 
NATURE 


When we try to conceive the state of mind of 
primitive man, the first thing that occurs to us is the 
bewilderment and terror he must have felt in the 


GREEK RELIGION AND NATURE 3 


presence of the powers of nature. Naked, houseless, 
weaponless, he is at the mercy, every hour, of this 
immense and incalculable Something so alien and so 
hostile to himself. As fire it burns, as water it 
drowns, as tempest it harries and destroys; benig- 
nant it may be at times, in warm sunshine and calm, 
but the kindness is brief and treacherous. Anyhow, 
whatever its mood, it has to be met and dealt with. 
By its help, or, if not, in the teeth of its resistance, 
every step in advance must be won; every hour, 
every minute, it is there to be reckoned with. What 
is it then, this persistent, obscure, unnameable 
Thing? Whatisit? The question haunts the mind; 
it will not be put aside; and the Greek at last, like 
other men under similar conditions, only with a lu- 
cidity and precision peculiar to himself, makes the 
reply, “It is something like myself.” Every power 
_of nature he presumes to be a spiritual being, imper- 
-sonating the sky as Zeus, the earth as Demeter, the 
sea as Poseidon; from generation to penébation: 
under his shaping hands, the figures multiply and de- 
fine themselves; character and story crystallize about 
what at first were little more than names; till at last, 
from the womb of the dark enigma that haunted 
him in the beginning, there emerges into the charmed 
light of a world of ideal grace a pantheon of fair and 
concrete personalities. Nature has become a com- 
pany of spirits; every cave and fountain is haunted 
by a nymph; in the ocean dwell the Nereids, in the 
mountain the Oread, the Dryad in the wood; and 
everywhere, in groves and marshes, on the pastures 
or the rocky heights, floating in the current of the 


4 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


streams or traversing untrodden snows, in the day 
at the chase and as evening closes in solitude finger- 
ing his flute, seen and heard by shepherds, alone or 
with his dancing train, is to be met the horned and 
goat-footed, the sunny-smiling Pan. 

Thus conceived, the world has become less terrible 
because more familiar. All that was incomprehen- 
sible, all that was obscure and dark, has now been _ 
seized and bodied forth in form, so that everywhere 
man is confronted no longer with blind and unintel- 
ligible force, but with spiritual beings moved by like 
passions with himself. The gods, it is true, were 
capricious and often hostile to his good, but at least 
they had a nature akin to his; if they were angry, 
they might be propitiated; if they were jealous, they 
might be appeased; the enmity of one might be 
compensated by the friendship of another; dealings 
with them, after all, were not so unlike dealings with 
men, and at the worst there was always a chance for 
courage, patience and wit. 

Man, in short, by his religion has been made at 
home in the world; and that is the first point to 
seize upon. ‘To drive it home, let us take an illus- 
tration from the story of Odysseus. 

Odysseus, it will be remembered, after the sack of 
Troy, for ten years was a wanderer on the seas, by 
tempest, enchantment, and every kind of danger 
detained, as it seemed, beyond hope of return from 
the wife and home he had left in Ithaca. The 
situation is forlorn enough. Yet, somehow or other, 
beauty in the story predominates over terror. And 
this, in part at least, because the powers with which 


GREEK RELIGION AND NATURE 5 


Odysseus has to do are not mere forces of nature, 
blind and indifferent, but spiritual beings who take 
an interest, for or against, in his fate. The whole 
story becomes familiar, and, if one may say so, 
comfortable, by the fact that it is conducted under 
the control and direction of the gods. Listen, for 
example, to the Homeric account of the onset of a 
storm, and observe how it sets one at ease with the 
elements: 

“Now the Lord, the shaker of the earth, on his 
way from the Ethiopians, espied Odysseus afar off 
from the mountains of the Solymi: even thence he 
saw him as he sailed over the deep; and he was yet 
more angered in spirit, and wagging his head he 
communed with his own heart. ‘Lo now, it must 
be that the gods at the last have changed their 
purpose concerning Odysseus, while I was away 
among the Ethiopians. And now he is nigh to the 
Phzeacian land, where it is so ordained that he escape 
the great issues of the woe which hath come upon 
him. But methinks, that even yet I will drive him 
far enough in the path of suffering.’ 

“With that he gathered the clouds and troubled 
the waters of the deep, grasping his trident in his 
hands; and he roused all storms of all manner of 
winds, and shrouded in clouds the land and sea: and 
down sped night from heaven. The East Wind and 
the South Wind clashed, and the stormy West, and 
the North, that is born in the bright air, rolling 
onward a great wave.” * 

The position of the hero is terrible, it is true, but 


1 Odyss. v 282.—Translated by Butcher and Lang. 


6 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


not with the terror of despair; for as it is a god that 
wrecked him, it may also be a god that will save. If 
Poseidon is his enemy, Athene, he knows, is his 
friend; and all lies, after all, in the hands, or, as the 
Greeks said, “on the knees,” not of a blind destiny, 
but of beings accessible to prayer. 

Let us take another passage from Homer to illus- 
trate the same point. It is the place where Achilles 
is endeavouring to light the funeral pyre of Patro- 
clus, but because there is no wind the fire will not 
catch. What is he to do? What can he do? No- 
thing, say we, but wait till the wind comes. But to 
the Greek the winds are persons, not elements; 
Achilles has only to call and to promise, and they 
will listen to his voice. And so, we are told, ‘“‘Fleet- 
footed noble Achilles had a further thought: stand- 
ing aside from the pyre he prayed to the two winds 
of North and West, and promised them fair offerings, 
and pouring large libations from a golden cup be- 
sought them to come, that the corpses might blaze 
up speedily in the fire, and the wood make haste to 
be enkindled. Then Iris, when she heard his prayer, 
went swiftly with the message to the Winds. They 
within the house of the gusty West Wind were 
feasting all together at meat, when Iris sped thither, 
and halted on the threshold of stone. And when 
they saw her with their eyes, they sprung up and 
called to her every one to sit by him. But she re- 
fused to sit, and spake her word; ‘No seat for me; 
I must go back to the streams of Ocean, to the Ethi- 
opians’ land where they sacrifice hecatombs to the 
immortal gods, that I too may feast at their rites. 


* 


GREEK RELIGION AND NATURE 7 


But Achilles is praying the North Wind and the 
loud West to come, and promising them fair offer- 
ings, that ye may make the pyre be kindled whereon 
lieth Patroclus, for whom all the Achaians are mak- 
ing moan.’ 

“She having thus said departed, and they arose 
with a mighty sound, rolling the clouds before them. 
And swiftly they came blowing over the sea, and the 
wave rose beneath their shrill blast; and they came 
to deep-soiled Troy, and fell upon the pile, and 
loudly roared the mighty fire. So all night drave 
they the flame of the pyre together, blowing shrill; 
and all night fleet Achilles, holding a two-handled 
cup, drew wine from a golden bowl, and poured it 
forth and drenched the earth, calling upon the spirit 
of hapless Patroclus. As a father waileth when he 
burneth the bones of his son, new-married, whose 
death is woe to his hapless parents, so wailed Achil- 
les as he burnt the bones of his comrade, going heav- 
ily round the burning pile, with many moans. 

“But the hour when the Morning Star goeth 
forth to herald light upon the earth, the star that 
saffron-mantled Dawn cometh after, and spreadeth 
over the salt sea, then grew the burning faint, and 
the flame died down. And the Winds went back 
again to betake them home over the Thracian main, 
and it roared with a violent swell. Then the son of 
Peleus turned away from the burning and lay down 
wearied, and sweet sleep leapt upon him.” * 

The exquisite beauty of this passage, even in 


1Tliad xxiii. p. 193.—Translated by Lang, Leaf and 
Myers. 


8 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


translation, will escape no lover of poetry. And it 
is a beauty which depends on the character of the 
Greek religion; on the fact that all that is unintel- 
ligible in the world, all that is alien to man, has been 
drawn, as it were, from its dark retreat, clothed in 
radiant form, and presented to the mind as a glori- 
fied image of itself. Every phenomenon of nature, 
night and “rosy-fingered” dawn, earth and sun, 
winds, rivers, and seas, sleep and death—all have 
been transformed into Divine and conscious agents, 
to be propitiated by prayer, interpreted by divina- 
tion, and comprehended by passions and desires 
identical with those which stir and control man- 
kind. 


§ 3. GREEK RELIGION AN INTERPRETATION OF 
THE HUMAN PASSIONS 


And as with the external world, so with the world 
within. The powers of nature were not the only 
ones felt by man to be different from and alien to 
himself; there were others, equally strange, dwelling 
in his own heart, which, though in a sense they were 
part of him, yet he felt to be not himself, which 
came upon him and possessed him without his 
choice and against his will. With these, too, he felt 
the need to make himself at home, and these, too, 
to satisfy his need, he shaped into creatures like 
himself. To the whole range of his inner experience 
he gave definition and life, presenting it to himself 
in a. series of spiritual forms. In Aphrodite, mother 
of Eros, he incarnated the passion of love, placing in 


GREEK RELIGION AND SOCIETY 9 


her broidered girdle “love and desire of loving con- 
verse that steals the wits even of the wise”; in 
Ares he embodied the lust of war; in Athene, wis- 
dom; in Apollo, music and the arts. The pangs 
of guilt took shape in the conception of avenging 
Furies; and the very prayers of the worshipper 
sped from him in human form, wrinkled and blear- 
eyed, with halting pace, in the rear of punishment. 
Thus the very self of man he set outside himself; 
the powers, so intimate, and yet so strange, that 
swayed him from within he made familiar by mak- 
ing them distinct; converted their shapeless terror 
into the beauty of visible form; and by merely pre- 
senting them thus to himself in a guise that was im- 
mediately understood, set aside, if he could not an- 
swer, the haunting question of their origin and end. 

Here then is at least a partial reply to our question 
as to the effect of a belief in the gods on the feeling 
of the Greek. To repeat the phrase once more, it’ 
made him at home in the world. The mysterious 
powers that controlled him it converted into beings 
like himself; and so gave him heart and breathing- 
space, shut in, as it were, from the abyss by this 
shining host of fair and familiar forms, to turn to 
the interests and claims of the passing hour an at- 
tention undistracted by doubt and fear. 


§ 4. GREEK RELIGION THE FOUNDATION 
OF SOCIETY 


But this relation to the world of nature is only 
one side of man’s life; more prominent and more 


10 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


important, at a later stage of his development, is his 
relation to society; and here too in Greek civiliza- 
tion a great part was played by religion. For the 
Greek gods, we must remember, were not purely 
“spiritual powers, to be known and approached only 
in the heart by prayer. ‘They were beings in hu- 
man form, like, though superior to ourselves, who 
passed a great part of their history on earth, inter- 
vened in the affairs of men, furthered or thwarted 
their undertakings, had begotten among them sons 
and daughters, and followed, from generation to gen- 
eration, the fortunes of their children’s children. 
Between them and mankind there was no impassable 
gulf; from Heracles the son of Zeus was descended 
the Dorian race; the Ionians from Ion, son of 
Apollo; every family, every tribe traced back its 
origin to a “hero,” and these “heroes” were chil- 
dren of the gods, and deities themselves. Thus were 
the gods, in the most literal sense, the founders of 
society; from them was derived, even physically, the 
unit of the family and the race; and the whole 
social structure raised upon that natural basis was 
necessarily penetrated through and through by the 
spirit of religion. 

We must not therefore be misled by the fact that 
there was no church in the Greek state to the idea 
that the state recognized no religion; on the con- 
trary, religion was so essential to the state, so bound 
up with its whole structure, in general and in detail, 
that the very conception of a separation between the 
powers was impossible. If there was no separate 
church, in our sense of the term, as an independent 


GREEK RELIGION AND SOCIETY 11 


organism within the state, it was because the state, 
in one of its aspects, was itself a church, and de- 
rived its sanction, both as a whole and in its parts, 
from the same gods who controlled the physical 
world. Not only the community as a whole but all 
its separate minor organs were under the protection 
oi patron deities. The family centred in the hearth, 
where the father, in his capacity of priest, offered 
sacrifice and prayer to the ancestors of the house; 
the various corporations into which families were 
grouped, the local divisions for the purpose of tax- 
ation, elections, and the like, derived a spiritual 
unity from the worship of a common god; and 
finally the all-embracing totality of the state it- 
self was explained and justified to all its members 
by the cult of the special protecting deity to whom 
its origin and prosperous continuance were due. 
The sailor who saw, on turning the point of Sunium, 
the tip of the spear of Athene glittering on the 
Acropolis, beheld in a type the spiritual form of the 
state; Athene and Athens were but two aspects of 
the same thing; and the statue of the goddess of wis- 
dom dominating the city of the arts may serve to 
sum up for us the ideal of that marvellous corporate 
life where there was no ecclesiastical religion only 
because there was no secular state. 

Regarded from this point of view, we may say 
that the religion of the Greeks was the inner aspect. 
of their political life. And we must add that in one 
respect their religion pointed the way to a higher 
political achievement than they were ever able to 
realize in fact. One fatal defect of the Greek civili- 


12 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


zation, as is familiar to students of their history, 
was the failure of the various independent city states 
to coalesce into a single harmonious whole. But the 
tendency of religion was to obviate this defect. We 
find, for example, that at one time or another fed- 
erations of states were formed to support in common 
the cult of some god; and one cult in particular there 
was—that of the Delphian Apollo—whose influence 
on political no less than on religious life was felt as 
far as and even beyond the limits of the Greek race. 
No colony could be founded, no war hazarded, no 
peace confirmed, without the advice and approval of 
the god—whose cult was thus at once a religious 
centre for the whole of Greece, and a forecast of a 
political unity that should co-ordinate into a whole 
her chaos of conflicting states. 

The religion of the Greeks being thus, as we have 
seen, the bond of their political life, we find its 
sanction extended at every point to custom and law. 
The persons of heralds, for example, were held to be 
under divine protection; treaties between states and 
contracts between individuals were confirmed by 
oath; the vengeance of the gods was invoked upon 
infringers of the law; national assemblies and mili- 
tary expeditions were inaugurated by public prayers; 
the whole of corporate life, in short, social and po- 
_ litical, was so embraced and bathed in an idealizing 
element of ritual that the secular and religious as- 
pects of the state must have been as inseparable te 
a Greek in idea as we know them to have heen in 
constitution. 


RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS 13 


§ 5. RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS 


For it was in ritual and art, not in propositions, 
that the Greek religion expressed itself; and in this 
respect it was closer to the Roman Catholic than to 
the Protestant branch of the Christian faith. The 
plastic genius of the race, the passion to embody 
ideas in form, drove them to enact for their own 
delight, in the most beautiful and telling forms, the 
whole conception they had framed of the world and 
of themselves. The changes of the seasons, with the 
toil they exact and the gifts they bring, the powers 
of generation and destruction, the bounty or the rig- 
ours of the earth; and on the other hand, the order 
and operations of social phenomena, the divisions 
of age and sex, of function and of rank in the state 
—all these took shape and came, as it were, to self- 
consciousness in a magnificent series of publicly or- 
dered fétes. So numerous were these and so diverse 
in their character that it would be impossible, even 
if it were desirable in this place, to give any general 
account of them. But it will be worth while, for the 
sake of illustration, to describe one, the great city 
festivals of Athens, called the Panathenza. 

In this national féte, held every four years, all the 
higher activities of Athenian life were ideally dis- 
played—contests of song, of lyre and of flute, foot 
and horse races, wrestling, boxing, and the like, 
military evolutions of infantry and horse, pyrrhic 
dances symbolic of attack and defence in war, mys- 
tic chants of women and choruses of youths—the 


14 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


whole concentring and discharging itself in that 
great processional act in which, as it were, the ma- 
terial forms of society became transparent, and the 
Whole moved on, illumined and visibly sustained by 
the spiritual soul of which it was the complete and 
harmonious embodiment. Of this procession we 
have still in the frieze of the Parthenon a marble 
transcript. There we may see the life of ancient 
Athens moving in stone, from the first mounting of 
their horses by isolated youths, like the slow and 
dropping prelude of a symphony, on to the thronged 
and trampling ranks of cavalry, past the antique 
chariots reminiscent of Homeric war, and the march- 
ing band of flutes and zithers, by lines of men and 
maidens bearing sacrificial urns, by the garlanded 
sheep and oxen destined for sacrifice, to where, on 
turning the corner that leads to the eastern front, we 
find ourselves in the presence of the Olympian gods 
themselves, enthroned to receive the offering of a 
people’s life. And if to this marble representation 
we add the colour it lacks, the gold and silver of the 
vessels, the purple and saffron robes; if we set the 
music playing and bid the oxen low; if we gird our 
living picture with the blaze of an August noon and 
crown it with the Acropolis of Athens, we may form 
a conception, better perhaps than could otherwise be 
obtained, of what religion really meant to the citizen 
of a state whose activities were thus habitually sym- 
bolized in the cult of its patron deity. Religion to 
him, clearly, could hardly be a thing apart, dwelling 
in the internal region of the soul and leaving outside, 


RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS 15 


untouched by the light of the ideal, the whole busi- 
ness and complexity of the material side~of life; 
to him it was the vividly present and active soul 
of his corporate existence, representing in the sym- 
bolic forms of ritual the actual facts of his experi- 
ence. What he re-enacted periodically, in ordered 
ceremony, was but the drama of his daily life; so 
that, as we said before, the state in one of its as- 
pects was a church, and every layman from one 
point of view a priest. 

The question, ‘What did a belief in the gods 
really mean to the Greek,” has now received at 
least some sort of answer. It meant, to recur to 
our old phrase, that he was made at home in the 
world. In place of the unintelligible powers of na- 
ture, he was surrounded by a company of beings 
like himself; and these beings who controlled the 
physical world were also the creators of human so- 
ciety. From them were descended the Heroes who 
founded families and states; and under their guid- 
ance and protection cities prospered and throve. 
Their histories were recounted in myths, and em- 
bodied in ritual. The whole life of man, in its re- 
lations both to nature and to society, was conceived 
as derived from and dependent upon his gods; and 
this dependence was expressed and brought vividly 
home to him in a series of religious festivals. Belief 
in the gods was not to him so much an intellectual 
conviction, as a spiritual atmosphere in which he 
moved; and to think it away would be to think 
away the whole structure of Greek civilization. 


16 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


§ 6. THe GREEK CONCEPTION OF THE RELATION 
oF MAN TO THE Gops 


Admitting, however, that all this is true, admitting 
the place of religion in Greek life, do we not end, 
after all, in a greater puzzle than we began with? 
For this it may be said, whatever it may be, is not 
what we mean by religion. This, after all, is merely 
a beautiful way of expressing facts; a translation, 
not an interpretation, of life. What we mean by re- 
ligion is something very different to that, something 
which concerns the relation of the soul to God; the 
sense of sin, for example, and of repentance and 
grace. The religion of the Greeks, we may admit, 
did something for them which our religion does not 
do for us. It gave intelligible and beautiful form 
to those phenomena of nature which we can only 
describe as manifestations of energy; it expressed 
in a ritual of exquisite art those corporate relations 
which we can only enunciate in abstract terms; 
but did it perform what after all, it may be said, is 
the true function of religion? did it touch the con- 
science as well as the imagination and intellect? 

To this question we may answer at once, broadly 
speaking, No! It was, we might say, a distin- 
guishing characteristic of the Greek religion that 
it did not concern itself with the conscience at all; 
the conscience, in fact, did not yet exist, to enact 
that drama of the soul with God which is the main 
interest of the Christian, or at least of the Protes- 
tant faith. To bring this point home to us let us 
open the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and present to our- 


¢ 


RELATION OF MAN TO THE GODS 17 


selves, in its most vivid colours, the position of the 
English Puritan: 

“Now, I saw, upon a time, when he was walking 
in the fields, that he was (as he was wont) reading 
in his book, and greatly distressed in his mind; and, 
as he read, he burst out, as he had done before, 
crying, ‘What shall I do to be saved?’ I looked 
then, and saw a man named Evangelist coming to 
him, and asked, ‘Wherefore dost thou cry?’ 

“He answered, ‘Sir, I perceive by the book in my 
hands that I am condemned to die, and after that to 
come to judgment; and I find that I am not willing 
to do the first, nor able to do the second.’ 

“Then said Evangelist, ‘Why not willing to 
die, since this life is attended with so many evils?’ 
The man answered, ‘Because I fear that this burden 
that is upon my back will sink me lower than the 
grave, and I shall fall into Tophet. And, Sir, if I be 
not fit to go to prison, I am not fit to go to judgment, 
and from thence to execution; and the thoughts of 
these things makes me cry.’ 

“Then, said Evangelist, ‘If this be thy condition, 
why standest thou still?’ He answered, ‘Because I 
know not whither to go.’ Then he gave him a 
parchment roll, and there was written within, ‘Fly 
from, the wrath to come.’ ” 

The whole spirit of the passage transcribed, and 
of the book from which it is quoted, is as alien as 
can be to the spirit of the Greeks. To the Puritan, 
the inward relation of the soul to God is everything; 
to the average Greek, one may say broadly, it was 
nothing; it would have been at variance with his 


18 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


whole conception of the divine power. For the gods 
of Greece were beings essentially like man, superior 
to him not in spiritual nor even in moral attributes, 
but in outward gifts, such as strength, beauty, and 
immortality. And as a consequence of this his rela- 
tions to them were not inward and spiritual, but 
external and mechanical. In the midst of a crowd 
of deities, capricious and conflicting in their wills, he 
had to find his way as best he could. There was no 
knowing precisely what a god might want; there was 
no knowing what he might be going todo. Ifaman 
fell into trouble, no doubt he had offended some- 
body, but it was not so easy to say whom or how; if 
he neglected the proper observances no doubt he 
would be punished, but it was not everyone who 
knew what the proper observances were. Altogether 
it was a difficult thing to ascertain or to move the 
will of the gods, and one must help oneself as best 
one could. The Greek, accordingly, helped himself 
by an elaborate system of sacrifice and prayer and 
divination, a system which had little connection 
with an internal spiritual life, but the object of which 
was simply to discover and if possible to affect the 
divine purposes. This is what we meant by saying 
that the Greek view of the relation of man to the 
gods was mechanical. The point will become 
clearer by illustration. 


§ 7. DIVINATION, OMENS, ORACLES 


Let us take first a question which much exercised 
the Greek mind—the difficulty of forecasting the 


DIVINATION, OMENS, ORACLES 19 


future. Clearly, the notion that the world was con- 
trolled by a crowd of capricious deities, swayed by 
human passions and desires, was incompatible with 
the idea of fixed law; but on the other hand it made 
it possible to suppose that some intimation might be 
had from the gods, either directly or symbolically, 
of what their intentions and purposes really were. 
And on this hypothesis we find developed, quite 
early in Greek history, a complex art of divining 
the future by signs. The flight of birds and other 
phenomena of the heavens, events encountered on 
the road, the speech of passers-by, or, most impor- 
tant of all, the appearance of the ‘entrails of the 
victims sacrificed were supposed to ) indicate the 
probable course of events. And this art, already 
mature in the time of the Homeric poems, we find 
flourishing throughout the historic age. Nothing 
could better indicate its prevalence and its scope 
than the following passage from Aristophanes, where 
he ridicules the readiness of his contemporaries to 
see in everything an omen, or, as he put it, punning 
on the Greek word, a “bird”: “On us you depend,” 
sings his chorus of Birds, 


“On us you depend, and to us you repair 
For council and aid, when a marriage is made, 
A purchase, a bargain, a venture in trade; 
Unlucky or lucky, whatever has struck ye, 
An ox or an ass, that may happen to pass, 
A voice in the street, or a slave that you meet, 
A name or a word by chance overheard, 
You deem it an omen, and call it a Bird.’ + 


1 Aristop. “Birds” 717.—Frere’s translation. 


20 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


Aristophanes, of course, is jesting; but how 
serious and important this art of divination must 
have appeared even to the most cultivated Athe- 
nians may be gathered from a passage of the 
tragedian A‘schylus, where he mentions it as one of 
the benefits conferred by Prometheus on mankind, 
and puts it on a level with the arts of building, 
metal-making, sailing, and the like, and the sciences 
of arithmetic and astronomy. 

And if anyone were dissatisfied with this method 
of interpretation by signs, he had a directer means 
of approaching the gods. He could visit one of the 
oracles and consult the deity at first hand about his 
most trivial and personal family affairs. Some of 
the questions put to the oracle at Dodona have been 
preserved to us,’ and very curious they are. ‘Who 
stole my cushions and pillow?” asks one bereaved 
householder. Another wants to know whether it 
will pay him to buy a certain house and farm; 
another whether sheep-farming is a good investment. 
Clearly, the god was not above being consulted on 
the meanest affairs; and his easy accessibility must 
have been some compensation for his probable ca- 
price. 

Nor must it be supposed that this phase of the 
Greek religion was a superstition confined to indi- 
viduals; on the contrary, it was fully recognized by 
the state. No important public act could be under- 
taken without a previous consultation of omens. 
More than once, in the clearest and most brilliant 


* See Percy Gardner, ‘““New Chapters in Greek History.” 


SACRIFICE AND ATONEMENT 21 


period of the Greek civilization, we hear of military 
expeditions being abandoned because the sacrifices 
were unfavourable; and at the time of the Persian 
invasion, at the most critical moment of the history 
of Greece, the Lacedemonians, we are told, came 
too late to be present at the battle of Marathon, 
because they thought it unlucky to start until the 
moon was full. 

In all this we have a suggestion of the sort of 
relation in which the Greek conceived himself to 
stand to the gods. It is a relation, as we said, ex- 
ternal and mechanical. The gods were superior be- 
ings who knew, it might be presumed, what was go- 
ing to happen; man didn’t know, but perhaps he 
could find out. How could he find out? that was 
the problem; and it was answered in the way we 
have seen. There was no question, clearly, of a 
spiritual relation; all is external; and a similar ex- 
ternality pervades, on the whole, the Greek view 
of sacrifice and of sin. Let us turn now to consider 
this point. 


§ 8. SACRIFICE AND ATONEMENT 


In Homer, we find that_sacrifice is frankly con- 
ceived as a sort of present.to. the gods,.for which 
they were in fairness bound to an equivalent return; 
and the nature of the bargain is fully recognized by 
the gods themselves. 

“Hector,” says Zeus to Hera, “was dearest to the 
gods of all mortals that are in Ilios. So was he to 
me at least, for nowise failed he in the gifts I loved. 


22 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


Never did my altar lack seemly feast, drink-offering 
and the steam of sacrifice, even the honour that 
falleth to our due.” ? And he concludes that he 
must intervene to secure the restoration of the body 
of Hector to his father. 

The performance of sacrifice, then, ensures fa- 
vour; and on the other hand its neglect entails pun- 
ishment. When Apollo sends a plague upon the 
Greek fleet the most natural hypothesis to account 
for his conduct is that he has been stinted of his due 
meed of offerings; ‘‘perhaps,’”’ says Agamemnon, 
“the savour of lambs and unblemished goats may 
appease him.” Or, again, when the Greeks omit to 
sacrifice before building the wall around their fleet, 
they are punished by the capture of their position 
by the Trojans. The whole relation between man 
and the gods is of the nature of a contract. “If 
you do your part, I'll do mine; if not, not!” that is 
the tone of the language on either side. The con- 
ception is legal, not moral nor spiritual; it has noth- 
ing to do with what we call sin and conscience. 

At a later period, it is true, we find a point of view 
prevailing which appears at first sight to come closer 
to that of the Christian. Certain acts we find, such 
as murder, for example, were supposed to infect as 
with a stain not only the original offender but his 
descendants from generation to generation. Yet 
even so, the stain, it appears, was conceived to be 
rather physical than moral, analogous to disease both 
in its character and in the methods of its cure. 


1 Tliad. xxiv. 66.—Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers. 


SACRIFICE AND ATONEMENT 23 


éschylus tells us of the earth breeding monsters as 
a result of the corruption infused by the shedding of 
blood; and similarly a purely physical infection 
tainted the man or the race that had been guilty of 
crime. And as was the evil, so was the remedy. 
External acts and observations might cleanse and 
purge away what was regarded as an external affec- 
tion of the soul; and we know that in historic times 
there was a class of men, comparable to the mediz- 
val “pardoners,” whose profession it was to effect 
such cures. Plato has described them for us in 
striking terms. ‘Mendicant prophets,” he says, “go 
to rich men’s doors and persuade them that they 
have a power committed to them of making an 
atonement for their sins or those of their fathers by 
sacrifices or charms, with rejoicings and games; and 
they promise to harm an enemy whether just or un- 
just, at a small charge; with magic arts and incanta- 
tions binding the will of heaven, as they say, to do 
their work. . . . And they produce a host of books 
written by Muszus and Orpheus, who were children 
of the Moon and the Muses—that is what they say 
—according to which they perform their ritual, and 
persuade not only individuals, but whole cities, that 
expiations and atonements for sin may be made by 
sacrifices and amusements which fill a vacant 
hour.” } 

How far is all this from the Puritan view of sin! 
how far from the Christian of the “Pilgrim’s Pro- 
gress” with the burden on his back! To measure 


1Plato’s Republic, II. 364b.—Jowett’s translation. 


24 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


the distance we have only to attend, with this pas- 
sage in our mind, a meeting, say, of the “Salvation 
Army.” We shall then perhaps understand better 
the distinction between the popular religion of the 
Greeks and our own; between the conception of sin 
as a physical contagion to be cured by external rites, 
and the conception of it as an affection of the con- 
science which only “grace” can expel. In the one 
case the fact that a man was under the taint of 
crime would be borne in upon him by actual mis- 
fortune from without—by sickness, or failure in 
business, or some other of the troubles of life; and he 
would ease his mind and recover the spring of hope 
by performing certain ceremonies and rites. In the 
other case, his trouble is all inward; he feels that 
he is guilty in the sight of God, and the only thing 
_ that can relieve him is the certainty that he has 
been forgiven, assured him somehow or other from 
within. The difference is fundamental, and impor- 
tant to bear in mind, if we would form a clear con- 
ception of the Greek view of life. 


§ 9. GUILT AND PUNISHMENT 


It must not be supposed, however, that the popular 
superstition described by Plato, however character- 
istic it may be of the point of view of the Greeks, 
represents the highest reach of their thought on the 
subject of guilt. No profounder utterances are to 
be found on this theme than those of the great poets 
and thinkers of Greece, who, without rejecting the 
common beliefs of their time, transformed them by 


GUILT AND PUNISHMENT 25 


the insight of their genius into a new and deeper 
significance. Specially striking in this connection is 
the poetry of the tragedian A‘schylus; and it will be 
well worth our while to pause for a moment and 
endeavour to realize his position. 

Guilt and its punishment is the constant theme of 
the dramas of A‘schylus; and he has exhausted the 
resources of his genius in the attempt to depict the 
horror of the avenging powers, who under the name 
of the Erinyes, or Furies, persecute and torment the 
criminal. Their breath is foul with the blood on 
which they feed; from their rheumy eyes a horrible 
humour drops; daughters of night and clad in black 
they fly without wings; god and man and the very 
beasts shun them; their place is with punishment 
and torture, mutilation, stoning and breaking of 
necks. And into their mouth the poet has put words 
which seem to breathe the very stinky of the Jewish 
scriptures. 


“Come now let us preach to the sons of men; yea, let us 
tell them of our vengeance; yea, let us all make mention 
of justice. 

“‘Whoso showeth hands that are undefiled, lo, he shall 
suffer nought of us for ever, but shall go unharmed to his 
ending. 

“But if he hath sinned, like unto this man, and covereth 
hands that are blood-stained: then is our witness true to 
the slain man. 

“And we sue for the blood, sue and pursue for it, so 

that at the last there is payment. 
Even so ’tis written: 
(Oh sentence sure!) 


26 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


“Upon all that wild in wickedness dip hand 
In the blood of their birth, in the fount of their 
flowing: 
So shall he pine until the grave receive him—to find 
no grace even in the grave; 
Sing then the spell, 
Sisters of hell; 
Chant him the charm 
Mighty to harm, 
Binding the blood, 
Maddening the mood; 
Such the music that we make: 
Quail, ye sons of man, and quake, 
Bow the heart, and bend, and break! 
This is our ministry marked for us from the be- 
ginning; 
This is our gift, and our portion apart, and our god- 
head, 
Ours, ours only for ever! 
Darkness, robes of darkness, a robe of terror for 
ever! 
Ruin is ours, ruin and wreck; 
When to the home 
Murder hath come, 
Making to cease 
Innocent peace; 
Then at his back 
Follow we in, 
Follow the sin; 
And ah! we hold to the end when we begin!” + 


There is no poetry more sublime than this; none © 
more penetrated with the sense of moral law. But 


1 Aschyl. Eum. 297.—Translated by Dr. Verrall (Cam- 
bridge, 1885). 


GUILT AND PUNISHMENT 27 


still it is wholly Greek in character. The theme is 
not merely the conscience of the sinner but the 
objective consequence of his crime. ‘Blood calls 
for blood,” is the poet’s text; a man, he says, must 
pay for what he does. The tragedy is the punish- 
ment of the guilty, rather than his inward sense of 
sin. Orestes, in fact, who is the subject of the 
drama with which we are concerned, in a sense was 
not a sinner at all. He had killed his mother, it is 
true, but only to avenge his father whom she had 
murdered, and at the express bidding of Apollo. So 
far is he from feeling the pangs of conscience that 
he constantly justifies his act. He suffers, not be- 
cause he has sinned but because he is involved in 
the curse of his race. For generations back the 
house of Atreus had been tainted with blood; mur- 
der had called for murder to avenge it; and Ores- 
tes, the last descendant, caught in the net of guilt, 
found that his only possibility of right action lay in 
a crime. He was bound to avenge his father, the 
god Apollo had enjoined it; and the avenging of his 
father meant the murder of his mother. What he 
commits, then, is a crime, but not a sin; and so it is 
regarded by the poet. The tragedy, as we have 
said, centres round an external objective law— 
“blood calls for blood.” But that is all. Of the in- 
ternal drama of the soul with God, the division of 
the man against himself, the remorse, the repent- 
ance, the new birth, the giving or withholding of 
grace—of all this, the essential content of Christian 
Protestantism, not a trace in the clear and concrete 
vision of the Greek. The profoundest of the poets 


28 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


of Hellas, dealing with the darkest problem of guilt, 
is true to the plastic genius of his race. The spirit 
throws outside itself the law of its own being; by ob- 
jective external evidence it learns that doing in- 
volves suffering; and its moral conviction comes to 
it only when forced upon it from without by a direct 
experience of physical evil. Of Auschylus, the most 
Hebraic of the Hellenes, it is as true as of the aver- 
age Greek, that in the Puritan meaning of the phrase 
he had no sense of sin. And even in treating of him, 
we must still repeat what we said at the beginning, 
that the Greek conception of the relation of man to 
the gods is external and mechanical, not inward and 
spiritual. 


§ 10. Mysticism 


But there is nothing so misleading as generaliza- 
tion, specially on the subject of the Greeks. Again 
and again when we think we have laid hold of their 
characteristic view we are confronted with some new 
aspect of their life which we cannot fit into harmony 
with our scheme. There is no formula which will 
sum up that versatile and many-sided people. And 
so, in the case before us, we have no sooner made 
what appears to be the safe and comprehensive state- 
ment that the Greeks conceived the relation of man 
to the gods mechanically, than we are reminded of 
quite another phase of their religion, different from 
and even antithetic to that with which we have 
hitherto been concerned. Nothing, we might be in- 
clined to say on the basis of what we have at pres- 
ent ascertained, nothing could be more opposed to 


MYSTICISM 29 


the clear anthropomorphic vision of the Greek, than 
that conception of a mystic exaltation, so constantly 
occurring in the history of religion, whose aim is to 
transcend the limits of human personality and pass 
into direct communion with the divine life. Yet of 
some such conception, and of the ritual devised un- 
der its influence, we have undoubted though frag- 
mentary indications in the civilization of the Greeks. 
It is mainly in connection with Demeter and Diony- 
sus that the phenomena in question occur. But even 
Apollo, who in one of his aspects is a figure so typi- 
cally Hellenic, the ever-young and beautiful god of 
music and the arts, was also the Power of prophetic 
inspiration, of ecstasy or passing out of oneself. 
The priestess who delivered his oracle at Delphi was 
possessed and mastered by the god. Maddened by 
mephitic vapours steaming from a cleft in the rock, 
convulsed in every feature and every limb, she de- 
livered in semi-articulate cries the burden of the di- 
vine message. Her own personality, for the time 
being, was annihilated; the wall that parts man from 
god was swept away; and the divine rushed in upon 
the human vessel it shattered as it filled. 

This conception of inspiration as a higher form 
of madness, possessed of a truer insight than that of 
sanity, was fully recognized among the Greeks. 
“There is a madness,” as Plato puts it, “which is 
the special gift of heaven, and the source of the 
chiefest blessing among men. For prophecy is a 
madness, and the prophetess at Delphi and the 
priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have 
conferred great benefits on Hellas, both in public 


30 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


and private life, but when in their senses few or 
none. . . . And in proportion as prophecy is higher 
and more perfect than divination both in name and 
reality, in the same proportion, as the ancients tes- 
tify, is madness superior to a sane mind, for the one 
is only of human, but the other of divine origin.’ } 

Here, then, in the oracle at Delphi, the centre of 
the religious life of the Greeks, we have an explicit 
affirmation of that element of mysticism which we 
might have supposed to be the most alien to their 
genius; and the same element re-appears, in a cruder 
and more barbaric form, in connection with the cult 
of Dionysus. He, the god of wine, was also the god 
of inspiration; and the ritual with which he was 
worshipped was a kind of apotheosis of intoxication. 
To suppress for a time the ordinary work-a-day 
consciousness, with its tedium, its checks, its balanc- 
ing of pros and cons, to escape into the directness 
and simplicity of mere animal life, and yet to feel in 
this no degradation, but rather a submission to the 
divine power, an actual identification with the deity 
—such, it would seem, was the intention of those 
extraordinary revels of which we have in the 
“Bacche” of Euripides so vivid a description. And 
to this end no stimulus was omitted to excite and 
inspire the imagination and the sense. The in- 
fluence of night and torches in solitary woods, in- 
toxicating drinks, the din of flutes and cymbals on 
a bass of thunderous drums, dances convulsing every 
limb and dazzling eyes and brain, the harking-back, 


1 Plato, Phaedrus, 244.—Jowett’s translation. 


MYSTICISM 31 


as it were, to the sympathies and forms of animal 
life in the dress of fawnskin, the horns, the snakes 
twined about the arm, and the impersonation of those 
strange half-human creatures who were supposed to 
attend upon the gods, the satyrs, nymphs, and fauns 
who formed his train—all this points to an attempt 
to escape from the bounds of ordinary consciousness, 
and pass into some condition conceived, however 
confusedly, as one of union with the divine power. 
And though the basis, clearly enough, is physical, 
yet the whole ritual does undoubtedly express, and 
that with a plastic grace and beauty that redeems 
its frank sensuality, that passion to transcend the 
limitations of human existence which is at the bot- 
tom of the mystic element in all religions. 

But this orgy of the senses was not the only form 
which the worship of Dionysus took in Greece. In 
connection with one of his legends, the myth of 
Dionysus Zagreus, we find traces of an esoteric doc- 
trine, taught by what were known as the orphic 
sects, very curiously opposed, one would have said, 
to the general trend of Greek conceptions. Accord- 
ing to one form of the story, Zagreus was the son of 
Zeus and Persephone. Hera, in her jealousy, sent 
the Titans to destroy him; after a struggle, they 
managed to kill him, cut him up and devoured all 
but the heart, which was saved by Athene and car- 
ried to Zeus. Zeus swallowed it, and produced 
therefrom a second Dionysus. The Titans he de- 
stroyed by lightning, and from their ashes created 
Man. Man is thus composed of two elements, one 
bad, the Titanic, the other good, the Dionysiac; the 


32 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


latter being derived from the body of Dionysus, 
which the Titans had devoured. This fundamental 
dualism, according to the doctrine founded on the 
myth, is the perpetual tragedy of man’s existence; 
and his perpetual struggle is to purify himself of the 
Titanic element. The process extends over many 
incarnations, but an ultimate deliverance is prom- 
ised by the aid of the redeemer Dionysus Lysius. 

The belief thus briefly described was not part of 
the popular religion of the Greeks, but it was a nor- 
mal growth of their consciousness, and it is men- 
tioned here as a further indication that even in what 
we call the classical age there were not wanting 
traces of the more mystic and spiritual side of re- 
ligion. Here, in the tenets.of these orphic sects, we 
have the doctrine of “original sin,” the conception of 
life as a struggle between two opposing principles, 
and the promise of an ultimate redemption by the 
help of the divine power. And if this be taken in 
connection with the universal and popular belief in 
inspiration as possession by the god, we shall see 
that our original statement that the relation of man 
to the gods was mechanical and external in the Greek 
conception, must at least be so far modified that it 
must be taken only as an expression of the central 
or dominant point of view, not as excluding other 
and even contradictory standpoints. 

Still, broadly speaking and admitting the limita- 
tions, the statement may stand. If the Greek popu- 
lar religion be compared with that of the Christian 
world, the great distinction certainly emerges, that 
in the one the relation of God to man is conceived as 


DEATH AND A FUTURE LIFE 33 


mechanical and external, in the other as inward and 
spiritual. The point has been sufficiently illustrated, 
and we may turn to another division of our subject. 


§ 11. THe Greek View oF DEATH AND A. 
FUTURE LIFE 


Of all the problems on which we expect light to 
be thrown by religion none, to us, is more pressing 
than that of death. A fundamental, and as many 
believe, the most essential part of Christianity, is its 


doctrine of reward and punishment in the world be- | 


yond; anda religion which had nothing at all to say | 


about this great enigma we should hardly feel to 


be a religion at all. And certainly on this head 


the Greeks, more than any people that ever lived, 
must have required a consolation and a hope. Just 
in proportion as their life was fuller and richer than 
that which has been lived by any other race, just in 
proportion as their capacity for enjoyment, in body 
and soul, was keener, as their senses were finer, their 
intellect broader, their passions more intense, must 
they have felt, with peculiar emphasis, the horror 
of decay and death. And such, in fact, is the char- 
acteristic note of their utterances on this theme. 
“Rather,” says the ghost of Achilles to Odysseus in 
the world of shades, ‘“‘rather would I live upon the 
soil as the hireling of another, with a landless man 
who had no great livelihood, than bear sway among 
all the dead that are no more. 1, Better, as 
Shakespeare has it, 
1 Od. xi. 489.—Translated by Butcher and Lang. 


34 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


“The weariest and most loathed worldly life 
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment 
Can lay on nature,” 


better that, on earth at least and in the sun, than the 
phantom kingdoms of the dead. The fear of age 
and death is the shadow of the love of life; and on 
no people has it fallen with more horror than on the 
Greeks. The tenderest of their songs of love close 
with a sob; and it is an autumn wind that rustles in 
their bowers. of spring. Here, for example, is a 
poem by Mimnermus characteristic of this mood of 
the Greeks: 


“OQ golden Love, what life, what joy but thine? 
Come death, when thou art gone, and make an end! 
When gifts and tokens are no longer mine, 
Nor the sweet intimacies of a friend. 
These are the flowers of youth. But painful age 
The bane of beauty, following swiftly on, 
Wearies the heart of man with sad presage 
And takes away his pleasure in the sun. 
Hateful is he to maiden and to boy 
And fashioned by the gods for our annoy.” ? 


Such being the general view of the Greeks on the 
subject of death, what has their religion to say by 
way of consolation? It taught, to begin with, that 
the spirit does survive after death. But this survi- 
val, as it is described in the Homeric poems, is 
merely that of a phantom and a shade, a bloodless 
and colourless duplicate of the man as he lived on 


1 Mimnermus, El. 1. 


DEATH AND A FUTURE LIFE 35 


earth. Listen to the account Odysseus gives of his 
meeting with his mother’s ghost. 

“So spake she, and I mused in my heart and would 
fain have embraced the spirit of my mother dead. 
Thrice I sprang towards her, and was minded to 
embrace her; thrice she flitted from my hands as a 
shadow or even as a dream, and sharper ever waxed 
the grief within me. And uttering my voice I spake 
to her winged words: 

““Mother mine, wherefore dost thou not tarry for 
me who am eager to seize thee, that even in Hades 
we twain may cast our arms each about the other, 
and satisfy us with chill lament? Is it but a phan- 
tom that the high goddess Persephone hath sent me, 
to the end that I may groan for more exceeding 
sorrow?’ 

“So spake I, and my lady mother answered me 
anon. 

‘Ah me, my child, luckless above all men, nought 
doth Persephone, the daughter of Zeus, deceive thee, 
but even in this wise it is with mortals when they 
die. For the sinews no more bind together the flesh 
and the bones, but the force of burning fire abolishes 
them, so soon as the life hath left the white bones, 
and the spirit like a dream flies forth and hovers 
near,’ ”’ * 

From such a conception of the life after death lit- 
tle comfort could be drawn; nor does it appear that 
any was sought. So far as we can trace the habitual 
attitude of the Greek he seems to have occupied him- 
self little with speculation, either for good or evil, as 


*QOd. xi. 204.—Translated by Butcher and Lang. 


36 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


to what might await him on the other side of the 
temb. He was told indeed in his legends of a happy 
place for the souls of heroes, and of torments re- 
served for great criminals; but these ideas do not 
seem to have haunted his imagination. He was 
never obsessed by that close and imminent vision of 
heaven and hell which overshadowed and dwarfed, 

for the medizval mind, the brief space of pilgrimage 
onearth. Rather he turned, by preference, from the 
thought of death back to life, and in the memory of 
honourable deeds in the past and the hope of fame 
for the future sought his compensation for the loss 
of youth and love. In the great funeral speech upon 
those who have fallen in war which Thucydides puts 
into the mouth of Pericles we have, we must suppose, 
a reflection, more accurate than is to be found else- 
where, of the position naturally adopted by the aver- 
age Greek. And how simple are the topics, how 
broad and human, how rigorously confined to the 
limits of experience! There is no suggestion any- 
where of a personal existence continued after death; 
the dead live only in their deeds; and only by mem- 
ory are the survivors to be consoled. 

“I do not now commiserate the parents of the 
dead who stand here; I would rather comfort them. 
You know that your life has been passed amid mani-_. 
fold vicissitudes; and that they may be deemed for- 
tunate who have gained most honour, whether an 
honourable death like theirs, or an honourable sor- 
row like yours, and whose days have been so ordered 
that the term of their happiness is likewise the term 
of their life. . . . Some of you are at an age at which 


DEATH AND A FUTURE LIFE 37 


they may hope to have other children, and they 
ought to bear their sorrow better; not only will the 
children who may hereafter be born make them for- 
get their now lost ones, but the city will be doubly 
a gainer. She will not be left desolate, and she will 
be safer. For a man’s counsels‘cannot be of equal 
weight or worth, when he alone has no children to 
risk in the general danger. To those of you who 
have passed their prime, say: ‘Congratulate your- 
selves that you have been happy during the greater 
part of your days; remember that your life of sorrow 
will not last long, and be comforted by the glory of 
those who are gone. For the love of honour alone 
is ever young, and not riches, as some say, but hon- 
our is the delight of men when they are old and use- 
less,’ ? + 

The passage perhaps represents what we may cali 
the typical attitude of the Greek. To seek consola- 


tion for death, if anywhere, then in life, and in life | 


not as it might be imagined beyond the grave, but as 
it had been and would be lived on earth, appears to 
be consonant with all that we know of the clear and 
objective temper of the race. It is the spirit which 
was noted long ago by Goethe as inspiring the se- 
pulchral monuments of Athens. 

“The wind,” he says, “which blows from the tombs 
of the ancients comes with gentle breath as over a 
mound of roses. The reliefs are touching and pa- 
thetic, and always represent life. There stand 
father and mother, their son between them, gazing 
at one another with unspeakable truth to nature. 


+Thuc. IJ, 44.—Jowett’s translation. 


—_—_—_— 


38 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


Here a pair clasp hands. Here a father seems to 
rest on his couch and wait to be entertained by his 
family. To me the presence of these scenes was 
very touching. Their art is of a late period, yet are 
they simple, natural, and of universal interest. 
Here there is no knight in harness on his knees await- 
| ing a joyful resurrection. The artist has with more 
_ or less skill presented to us only the persons them- 
| selves, and so made their existence lasting and per- 
, petual. They fold not their hands, gaze not into 
heaven; they are on earth, what they were and what 
they are. They stand side by side, take interest in 
one another; and that is what is in the stone, even 
though somewhat unskilfully, yet most pleasingly de- 
picted.” * 

As a further illustration of the same point an 
epitaph may be quoted equally striking for its simple 
human feeling and for its absence of any suggestion 
of a continuance of the life of the dead. ‘‘Farewell” 
is the first and last word; no hint of a “joyful res- 
urrection.” 

“Farewell, tomb of Melité; the best of women 
lies here, who loved her loving husband, Onesimus; 
thou wert most excellent, wherefore he longs for thee 
after thy death, for thou wert the best of wives.— 
Farewell, thou too, dearest husband, only love my 
children.” ? 


1¥From Goethe’s ‘“Italienische Reise.” I take this 
translation (by permission) from Percy Gardner’s “New 
Chapters in Greek History,” p. 319. 

* Percy Gardner, ‘“New Chapters in Greek History,” 
Dp. S20. 


DEATH AND A FUTURE LIFE 39 


But however characteristic this attitude of the 
Greeks may appear to be, especially by contrast 
with the Christian view, it would be a mistake to 
suppose that it was the only one with which they 
were acquainted, or that they had put aside alto- 
gether, as indifferent or insoluble, the whole problem 
of a future world. As we have seen, they did be- 
lieve in the survival of the spirit, and in a world of 
shades ruled by Pluto and Persephone. They had 
legends of a place of bliss for the good and a place 
of torment for the wicked; and if this conception did 
not haunt their mind, as it haunted that of the me- 
dizval Christian, yet at times it was certainly pres- 
ent to them, with terror or with hope. That the 


Greek was not unacquainted with the fear of hell we 


know from the passage of Plato, part of which we 
have already quoted, where in speaking of the men- 
dicant prophets who professed to make atonement 
for sin he says that their ministrations ‘‘are equally 
at the service of the living and the dead; the latter 
sort they call mysteries, and they redeem. us from the 
pains of hell, but if we neglect them no one knows 
what awaits us.” * And on the other hand we hear, 
as early as the date of the Odyssey, of the Elysian 
fields reserved for the souls of the favourites of the 
gods. 


The Greeks, then, were not without hope and fear 


concerning the world to come, however little these 
feelings may have coloured their daily life; and 
there was one phase of their religion, which appears 


-1 Plato, Rep. II. 364 e.—Jowett’s translation. 


_— 


40 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


to have been specially occupied with this theme. In 
almost every Greek city we hear of “mysteries,” the 
_ most celebrated being, of course, those of Eleusis in 
\ Attica. What exactly these “mysteries” were we 
are very imperfectly informed; but so much, at least, 
is clear that by means of a scenic symbolism, repre- 
senting the myth of Demeter and Kore or of Diony- 
sus Zagreus, hopes were held out to the initiated not 
only of a happy life on earth, but of a happy im- 
mortality beyond. “Blessed,” says Pindar, “blessed 
is he who has seen these things before he goes under 
the hollow earth. He knows the end of life, and he 
knows its god-given origin.”” And it is presumably 
to the initiated that the same poet promises the joys 
of his thoroughly Greek heaven. “For them,” he 
says, “‘shineth below the strength of the sun while 
in our world it is night, and the space of crimson- 
flowered meadows before their city is full of the 
shade of frankincense-trees, and of fruits of gold. 
And some in horses, and in bodily feats, and some in 
dice, and some in harp- playing have delight; and 
among them thriveth all fair-flowering bliss; and 
fragrance streameth ever through the lovely land, as 
they mingle incense of every kind upon the altars of 
the gods.” * 

The Greeks, then, were not unfamiliar with the 
_ conception of heaven and hell; only, and that is the 
_ point to which we must return and on which we 
- must insist, the conception did not dominate and ob- 
' sess their mind. They may have had their spasms 


+ Pindar, Thren. I.—Translation by E. Myers. 


¢ 


CRITICAL AND SCEPTICAL OPINION 41 


of terror, but these they could easily relieve by the 
performance of some atoning ceremony; they may 
have had their thrills of hope, but these they would 
only indulge at the crisis of some imposing ritual. 
The general tenor of their life does not seem to have 
been much affected by speculations about the world 
beyond. Of age indeed and of death they had a 
horror proportional to their acute and sensitive en- 
joyment of life; but their natural impulse was to) 
turn for consolation to the interests and achieve- 
ments of the world they knew, and to endeavour to’ 
soothe, by memories and hopes of deeds future and 
past, the inevitable pains of failure and decay. 


§ 12. CriTICAL AND SCEPTICAL OPINION IN 
GREECE 


And now let us turn to a point for which perhaps 
some readers have long been waiting, and with which 
they may have expected us to begin rather than to 
end. So far, in considering the part played by reli- 
gion in Greek life, we have assumed the position of 
orthodoxy. We have endeavoured to place our- 
selves at the standpoint of the man who did not criti- 
cize or reflect, but accepted simply, as a matter of 
course, the tradition handed down to him by his fath- 
ers. Only so, if at all, was it possible for us to de- 
tach ourselves from our habitual preconceptions, 
and to regard the pagan mythology not as a graceful 
invention of the poets, but as a serious and, at the 
time, a natural and inevitable way of looking at the 
world. Now, however, it is time to turn to the other 


42 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


side, and to consider the Greek religion as it ap- 
peared to contemporary critics. For critics there 
were, and sceptics, or rather, to put it more exactly, 
there was a critical age succeeding an age of faith. 
| As we trace, however imperfectly, the development 
_of the Greek mind, we can observe their intellect and 
their moral sense expanding beyond the limits of 
their creed. Either as sympathetic, though candid, 
friends, or as avowed enemies, they bring to light its 
contradictions and defects; and as a result of the 
_ process one of two things happens. LEither the an- 
| cient conception of the gods is transformed in the 
_ direction of monotheism, or it is altogether swept 
\ away, and a new system of the world built up, on the 
‘basis of natural science or of philosophy. These 
tendencies of thought we must now endeavour to 
trace; for we should have formed but an imperfect 
idea of the scope of the religious consciousness of 
the Greeks if we confined ourselves to what we may 
call their orthodox faith. It is in their most critical 
thinkers, in Euripides and Plato, that the religious 
sense is most fully and keenly developed; and it is in 
the philosophy that supervened upon the popular 
creed, rather than in the popular creed itself, that 
we shall find the highest and most spiritual reaches 
of their thought. 

Let us endeavour, then, in the first place to realize 
to ourselves how the Greek religion must have ap- 
peared to one who approached it not from the side of 
unthinking acquiescence, but with the idea of discov- 
ering for himself how far it really met the needs 


¢ 


CRITICAL AND SCEPTICAL OPINION 43 


and claims of the intellect and the moral sense. 
Let us imagine him turning to his Homer, to those 
poems which were almost the Bible of the Greek, 
his ultimate appeal both in religion and in ethics; 
which were taught in the schools, quoted in the law- 
courts, recited in the streets; and from which the 
teacher drew his moral instances, the rhetorician his 
allusions, the artist his models, every man his con- 
ception of the gods. Let us imagine some candid 
and ingenuous youth, turning to his Homer and re- 
peating, say, the following passage of the Iliad:— 

‘“‘Among the other gods fell grievous bitter strife, 
and their hearts were carried diverse in their breasts. 
And they clashed together with a great noise, and 
the wide earth groaned, and the clarion of great 
Heaven rang around. Zeus heard as he sate upon 
Olympus, and his heart within him laughed pleas- 
antly when he beheld that strife of the gods.” * 

At this point, let us suppose, the reader pauses to 
reflect; and is struck, for the first time, with a shock 
of surprise by the fact that the gods should be not 
only many but opposed; and opposed on what issue? 
a purely human one! a war between Greeks and 
Trojans for the possession of a beautiful woman! 
Into such a contest the immortal gods descend, fight 
with human weapons, and dispute in human terms! 
Where is the single purpose that should mark the 
divine will? where the repose of the wisdom that 
foreordained and knows the end? Not, it is clear, 


1 Jliad xxi. 385.—Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers. 


44 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


in this motley array of capricious and passionate 
wills!’ Then, perhaps, in Zeus, Zeus, who is lord of 
all? He, at least, will impose upon this mob of 
recalcitrant deities the harmony which the pious soul 
demands. He, whose rod shakes the sky, will arise 
and assert the law. He, in his majesty, will speak 
the words—alas! what words! Let us take them 
straight from the lips of the King of gods and 
men :— 

“Hearken to me, all gods and all ye goddesses, 
that I may tell you that my heart within my breast 
commandeth me. One thing let none essay, be it 
goddess or be it god, to wit, to thwart my saying; 
approve ye it all altogether, that with all speed I 
may accomplish these things. Whomsoever I shall 
perceive minded to go, apart from the gods, to suc- 
cour Trojans or Danaans, chastened in no seemly 
wise shall he return to Olympus, or I will take and 
cast him into misty Tartaros, right far away, where 
is the deepest gulf beneath the earth; there are the 
gate of iron and threshold of bronze, as far beneath 
Hades as heaven is high above the earth: then shall 
ye know how far I am mightiest of all gods. Go to 
now, ye gods, make trial that ye all may know. 
Fasten ye a rope of gold from heaven, and all ye 
gods lay hold thereof and all goddesses; yet cculd 
ye not drag from heaven to earth Zeus, counsellor 
supreme, not though ye toiled sore. But once I like- 
wise were minded to draw with all my heart, then 
should I draw ye up with very earth and sea withal. 
Thereafter would I bind the rope about a pinnacle 
of Olympus, and so should all those things be hung 


* 


CRITICAL AND SCEPTICAL OPINION 45 


in air. By so much am I beyond gods and beyond 
men,” * 

And is that all? In the divine tug-of-war Zeus 
is more than a match for all the other gods together! 
Is it on this that the lordship of heaven and earth 
depends? This that we are to worship as highest, 
we of the brain and heart and soul? And even so, 
even admitting the ground of supremacy, with what 
providence or consistency of purpose is it exercised? 
Why, Zeus himself is as capricious as the rest! Be- 
cause Thetis comes whining to him about an insult 
put upon Achilles, he interferes to change the whole 
course of the war, and that too by means of a lying 
dream! Even his own direct decrees he can hardly 
be induced to observe. His son Sarpedon, for ex- 
ample, who is “fated,” as he says himself, to die, he 
is yet at the last moment in half a mind to save alive! 
How is such division possible in the will of the su- 
preme god? Or is the “fate” of which he speaks 
something outside himself? But if so, then above 
him! and if above him, what is he? Not, after all, 
the highest, not the supreme at all! What then are 
we to worship? What ts this higher ‘“‘fate’’? 

Such would be the kind of questions that would 
vex our candid youth when he approached his 
Homer from the side of theology. Nor would he 
fare any better if he took the ethical point of view. 
The gods, he would find, who should surely at least . 
attain to the human standard, not only are capable 
of every phase of passion, anger, fear, jealousy, and, | 


* Yliad. viii. 5.—Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers. 


46 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


above all, love, but indulge them all with a verve 
and an abandonment that might make the boldest 
libertine pause. Zeus himself, for example, expends 
upon the mere catalogue of his amours a good twelve 
lines of hexameter verse. No wonder that Hera is 
jealous, and that her lord is driven to put her down 
in terms better suited to the lips of mortal hus- 
bands: 

“Lady, ever art thou imagining, nor can I escape 
thee; yet shalt, thou in no wise have power to fulfil, 
but wilt thou be the further from my heart; that 
shall be even the worse for thee. Hide thou in si- 
lence and hearken to my bidding, lest all the gods 
that are in Olympus keep not off from thee my visit- 
ation, when I put forth my hands unapproachable 
against thee.” ? 


§ 13. ETHICAL CRITICISM 


The incongruity of all this with any adequate con- 
ception of deity is patent, if once the critical atti- 
tude be adopted; and it was adopted by some of the 
clearest and most religious minds of Greece. Nay, 
even orthodoxy itself did not refrain from a genial 
and sympathetic criticism. Aristophanes, for ex- 
ample, who, if there had been an established church, 
would certainly have been described as one of its 
main pillars, does not scruple to represent his Birds 
as issuing— 

“A warning and notices, formally given, 

To Jove, and all others residing in heaven, 


+ Tliad i. 560.—Translated by Leaf, Lang and Myers. 


ETHICAL CRITICISM 47 


Forbidding them ever to venture again 

To trespass on our atmospheric domain, 

With scandalous journeys, to visit a list — 

Of Alcmenas and Semeles; if they persist, 

We warn them that means will be taken moreover 
To stop their gallanting and acting the lover.” 


and Heracles the glutton, and Dionysus, the dandy 
and the coward, are familiar figures of his comic 
stage. 

The attitude of Aristophanes, it is true, is not 
really critical, but sympathetic; it was no more his 
intention to injure the popular creed by his fun than 
it is the intention of the cartoons of Punch to under- 
mine the reputation of our leading statesmen. On 
the contrary, nothing popularizes like genial ridi- 
cule; and of this Aristophanes was well aware. But 
the same characteristics of the gods which suggested 
the friendly burlesque of the comedians were also 
those which provoked the indignation and the disgust 
of more serious minds. The poet Pindar, for ex- 
ample, after referring to the story of a battle, in 
which it was said gods had fought against gods, 
breaks out into protest against a legend so little 
creditable to the divine nature: —‘“O my mouth, fling 
this tale from thee, for to speak evil of gods is a 
hateful wisdom, and loud and unmeasured words 
strike a note that trembleth upon madness. Of such 
things talk thou not; leave war and all strife of im- 
mortals aside.” * And the same note is taken up 


+ Aristophanes, “Birds” 556.—Translation by Frere. 
* Pind. Ol. IX. 54.—Translation by E. Myers. 


ad 


48 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


with emphasis, and reiterated in every quality of 
tone, by such writers as Euripides and Plato. 

The attitude of Euripides towards the popular 
religion is so clearly and frankly critical that a re- 
cent writer has even gone so far as to maintain that 
his main object in the construction of his dramas 
was to discredit the myths he selected for his theme. 
However that may have been, it is beyond contro- 
versy true that the deep religious sense of this most 
modern of the Greeks was puzzled and repelled by 
the tales he was bound by tradition to dramatize; 
and that he put into the mouth of his characters re- 
flexions upon the conduct of the gods which if they 
may not be taken as his own deliberate opinions, are 
at least expressions of one aspect of his thought. It 
was, in fact, impossible to reconcile with a profound 
and philosophic view of the divine nature the in- 
trigues and amours, partialities, antipathies, actions 
and counter-actions of these anthropomorphic dei- 
ties. Consider, for example, the most famous of all 
the myths, that of Orestes, to which we have already 
referred. Orestes, it will be remembered, was the 
son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Agamem- 
non, on his return from Troy, was murdered by 
Clytemnestra. Orestes escapes; but returns later, 
at the instigation of Apollo, and kills his mother to 
avenge his father. Thereupon, in punishment for 
his crime, he is persecuted by the Furies. Now the 
point which Euripides seizes here is the conduct of 
Apollo. Either it was right for Orestes to kill his 
mother, or it was wrong. If wrong, why did Apollo 
command it? If right, why was Orestes punished? 


ETHICAL CRITICISM 49 


Or are there, as A‘schylus would have it, two 
“rights,” one of Apollo, the other of the Furies? If 
so, what becomes of that unity of the divine law 


| after which every religious nature seeks? The di- 


lemma is patent; and Euripides makes no serious at- 
tempt to meet it. 

Or again, to take another example, less familiar, 
but even more to the point—the tale of Ion and 
Creusa. Creusa has been seduced by Apollo and 
has borne him a child, the Ion of the story. This 
child she exposes, and it is conveyed by Hermes to 
Delphi, where at last it is found, and recognized by 
the mother, and a conventionally happy ending is 
patched up. But the point on which the poet has in- 
sisted throughout is, once more, the conduct of 
Apollo. What is to be made of a god who seduces 
and deserts a mortal woman; who suffers her to ex- 
pose her child, and leaves her in ignorance of its 
fate? Does he not deserve the reproaches heaped 
upon him by his victim?— 


“Child of Latona, I cry to the sun—I will publish 
thy shame! 

Thou with thy tresses a-shimmer with gold, through 
the flowers as I came 

Plucking the crocuses, heaping my veil with their 
gold-litten flame, 

Cam’st on me, caughtest the poor pallid wrists of 
mine hands, and didst hale 

Unto thy couch in the cave. ‘Mother! mother!’ 
I shrieked out my wail— 

Wroughtest the pleasure of Kypris; no shame made 
the god-lover quail. 


50 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


Wretched I bare thee a child, and I cast him with 
shuddering throe 

Forth on thy couch where thou forcedst thy victim, 
a bride-bed of woe. 

Lost—my poor baby and thine! for the eagles 
devoured him: and lo! 

Victory-songs to thy lyre dost thou chant!—Ho, I 
call to thee, son 

Born to Latona, Dispenser of boding, on gold- 
gleaming throne 

Midmost of earth who are sitting:—thine ears shall 
be pierced with my moan! 

Thy Delos doth hate thee, thy bay-boughs abhor 
thee, 

By the palm-tree of feathery frondage that rose 

Where in sacred travail Latona bore thee 
In Zeus’s garden close.’ ? 


This is a typical example of the kind of criticism 
which Euripides conveys through the lips of his 
characters on the stage. And the points which he 
can only dramatically suggest, Plato expounds di- 
rectly in his own person. ‘The quarrel of the philos- 
opher with the myths is not that they are not true, 
but that they are not edifying. They represent the 
son in rebellion against the father—Zeus against 
Kronos, Kronos against Uranos; they describe the 
gods as intriguing and fighting one against the other; 
they depict them as changing their form divine into 
the semblance of mortal men; lastly—culmination — 
of horror!—they represent them as laughing, posi- 
tively laughing!—Or again, to turn to a more meta-_— 


1 Euripid. Ion. 885.—Translated by A. S. Way. 


TRANSITION TO MONOTHEISM 51 


physical point, if God be good, it is argued by Plato, 
he cannot be the author of evil. What then, are we’ 


_ to make of the passage in Homer where he says, 
“two urns stand upon the floor of Zeus filled with 
his evil gifts, and one with blessings. To whomso- 
ever Zeus whose joy is in the lightning dealeth a 
mingled lot, that man chanceth now upon ill and 
now again on good, but to whom he giveth but of 
the bad kind, him he bringeth to scorn, and evil 
famine chaseth him over the goodly earth, and he is 
a wanderer honoured of neither gods nor men.” } 


And again, if God be true, he cannot be the author | 


of lies. How then could he have sent, as we are 
told he did, lying dreams to men?—Clearly, con- 
cludes the philosopher, our current legends need re- 
vision; in the interest of religion itself we must de- 
stroy the myths of the popular creed. 


§ 14. TRANSITION TO MONOTHEISM 


The myths, but not religion! The criticism cer- 
tainly of Plato and probably of Euripides was 
prompted by the desire not to discredit altogether 
the belief in the gods, but to bring it into harmony 
with the requirements of a more fully developed con- 
sciousness. The philosopher and the poet came not 
to destroy, but to fulfil; not to annihilate, but to 
transform the popular theology. Such an intention, 
strange as it may appear to us with our rigid creeds, 
we shall see to be natural enough to the Greek mind, 


*Tliad xxiv. 527.—Translated by Lang, Leaf and 
Myers. 


52 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


when we remember that the material of their religion 
was not a set of propositions, but a more or less 
indeterminate body of traditions capable of being 
presented in the most various forms as the genius 
and taste of individual poets might direct. And we 
find, in fact, that the most religious poets of Greece, 
those even who were most innocent of any intention 
to innovate on popular beliefs, did nevertheless un- 
_ consciously tend to transform, in accordance with 
their own conceptions, the whole structure of the 
Homeric theology. Taking over the legends of gods 
and heroes, as narrated in poetry and tradition, 
Aéschylus and Sophocles, as they shaped and re- 
shaped their material for the stage, were evolving for 
themselves, not in opposition to but as it were on the 
top of the polytheistic view, the idea of a single su- 
preme and righteous God. The Zeus of Homer, 
whose superiority, as we saw, was based on physical 
force, grows, under the hands of A‘schylus, into 
something akin to the Jewish Jehovah. The inner 
experience of the poet drives him inevitably to this 
transformation. Born into the great age of Greece, 
coming to maturity at the crisis of her fate, he had 
witnessed with his own eyes, and assisted with his 
own hands the defeat of the Persian host at Mara- 
thon. The event struck home to him like a judg- 
ment from heaven. The Nemesis that attends upon 
human pride, the vengeance that follows crime, 
henceforth were the thoughts that haunted and pos- 
sessed his brain; and under their influence he 
evolved for himself out of the popular idea of Zeus 
the conception of a God of justice who marks and 


TRANSITION TO MONOTHEISM — 53 


avenges crime. Read for example the following 
passage from the “Agamemnon” and contrast it with 
the lines of Homer quoted on page 42. Nothing 
could illustrate niore strikingly the transformation 
that could be effected, under the conditions of the 
Greek religion, in the whole conception of the di- 
vine power by one whose conscious intention, never- 
theless, was not to innovate but to conserve. 


“Zeus the high God! whate’er be dim in doubt, 
This can our thought track out— 
The blow that fells the sinner is of God, 
And as he wills, the rod 
Of vengeance smiteth sore. One said of old 
‘The gods list not to hold 
A reckoning with him whose feet oppress 
The grace of holiness’— 
An impious word! for whensoe’er the sire 
Breathed forth rebellious fire— 
What time his household overflows the measure 
Of bliss and health and treasure— 
His children’s children read the reckoning plain, 
At last, in tears and pain. 
SS * DT * * 


Who spurns the shrine of Right, nor wealth nor power 
Shall be to him a tower, 

To guard him from the gulf: there lies his lot, 
Where all things are forgot. 

Lust drives him on—lust, desperate and wild 
Fate’s sin-contriving child— 

And cure is none; beyond concealment clear 
Kindles sin’s baleful glare. 

As an ill coin beneath the wearing touch 
Betrays by stain and smutch 


54 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


Its metal false—such is the sinful wight. 
Before, on pinions light, 

Fair pleasure flits, and lures him childlike on, 
While home and kin make moan 

Beneath the grinding burden of his crime; 
Till, in the end of time, 

Cast down of heaven, he pours forth fruitless prayer 
To powers that will not hear.” + 


And Sophocles follows in the same path. For him 
| too Zeus is no longer the god of physical strength: 
\ he is the creator and sustainer of the moral law—of 
“those laws of range sublime, called into life 
throughout the high clear heaven, whose father is 
Olympus alone; their parent was no race of mortal 
men, no, nor shall oblivion ever lay them to sleep; a 
mighty god is in them, and he grows not old.” ? 
Such words imply a complete transformation of the 
Homeric conception of Divinity; a transformation 
made indeed in the interests of religion, but involv- 
ing nevertheless, and contrary, no doubt, to the in- 
tentions of its authors, a complete subversion of the 
popular creed. Once grant the idea of God as an 
eternal and moral Power and the whole fabric of 
polytheism falls away. The religion of the Greeks, 
as interpreted by their best minds, annihilates itself. 
Zeus indeed is saved, but only at the cost of all 


Olympus. 
1 Asch. Agamem. 367.—Translated by E. D. A. Mors- 


head (‘“The House of Atreus’’). 
* Soph. O. T. 865,—Translated by Dr. Jebb. 


METAPHYSICAL CRITICISM 55 


§ 15. METAPHYSICAL CRITICISM 


_ While thus, on the one hand, the Greek religion 
by its inner evolution was tending to destroy itself, 
on the other hand it was threatened from without 
by the attack of what we should call the “scientific 
spirit.” A systema so frankly anthropomorphic was \ 
bound to be weak on the speculative side. Its 
appeal, as we have seen, was rather to the imagina- 
tion than to the intellect, by the presentation of a 
series of beautiful ymages, whose contemplation 
might offer to the mind if not satisfaction, at least 
acquiescence and repose. A Greek who was not too 
inquisitive was thus enabled to move through the 
calendar of splendid festivals and fasts, charmed by 
the beauty of the ritual, inspired by the chorus 
and the dance, and drawing from the familiar leg- 
ends the moral and esthetic significance with which 
he had been accustomed from his boyhood to con- 
nect them, but without ever raising the question, Is 
all this true? Does it really account for the exist- 
ence and nature of the world? Once, however, the 
spell was broken, once the intellect was aroused, the 
anadequacy of the popular faith, on the speculative 
side, became apparent; and the mind turned aside 
altogether from religion to work out its problems on 
its own lines. We find accordingly, from early 
times, physical philosophers in Greece free from all 
theological preconceptiuns, raising from the very 
beginning the question of the origin of the world, 
and offering solutions, various indeed but all alike in 


56 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


_ this, that they frankly accept a materialistic basis. 


One derives all things from water, another from air, 
another from fire; one insists upon unity, another 
on a plurality of elements, but all alike reject the 
supernatural, and proceed on the lines of physical 


causation. 


The opposition, to use the modern phrase, between 
science and religion, was thus developed early in 
ancient Greece; and by the fifth century it is clear 


that it had become acute. The _ philosopher 


Anaxagoras was driven from Athens as an atheist; 
the same charge, absurdly enough, was one of the 
counts in the indictment of Socrates; and the physi- 
cal speculations of the time are a favourite butt of 
that champion of orthodoxy, Aristophanes. To fol- 
low up these speculations in detail would be to wan- 
der too far from our present purpose; but it may be 
worth while to quote a passage from the great come- 
dian, to illustrate not indeed the value of the theoriec 
ridiculed, but their generally materialistic character, 
and their antagonism to the popular faith. The 
passage selected is part of a dialogue between 
Socrates and Strepsiades, one of his pupils; and it 
is introduced by an address from the chorus of 
“Clouds,” the new divinities of the physicist: 


CHoRusS OF CLOUDS. 
Our welcome to thee, old man, who would see the mar- 
vels that science can show: 
And thou, the high-priest of this subtlety feast, say what 
would you have us bestow ? 
Since there is not a sage for whom we’d engage our won- 
ders more freely to do, 


METAPHYSICAL CRITICISM D7 


Except, it may be, for Prodicus: he for his knowledge 
may claim them, but you, 
Because, as you go, you glance to and fro, and in dig- 
nified arrogance float; 
And think shoes a disgrace, and put on a grave face, 
your acquaintance with us to denote. 
STREPSIADES. 
Oh, earth! what a sound, how august and profound! it 
fills me with wonder and awe. 
SOCRATES. 
These, these then alone, for true Deities own, the rest 
are all God-ships of straw. 
STREPS. 
Let Zeus be left out: He’s a God beyond doubt; come, 
that you can scarcely deny. 
SOCR. 
Zeus indeed! there’s no Zeus: don’t you be so obtuse. 
STREPS. 
No Zeus up above in the sky? 
Then you first must explain, who it is sends the rain; 
or I really must think you are wrong. 
Socr. 
Well then, be it known, these send it alone: I can prove 
it by argument strong. 
Was there ever a shower seen to fall in an hour when 
the sky was all cloudless and blue? 
Yet on a fine day, when the clouds are away, he might 
send one, according to you. 
STREPS. 
Well, it must be confessed, that chimes in with the rest: 
your words I am forced to believe. 
Yet before I had dreamed that the rain-water steamed 
from Zeus and his chamber-pot sieve. 
But whence then, my friend, does the thunder descend ? 
that does make us quake with affright! 


58 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


SOCR. 
Why, ’tis they, I declare, as they roll through the air, 
STREPS. 
What the clouds? did I hear you aright? 
SOCR. 
Ay: for when to the brim filled with water they swim, 
by Necessity carried along, 
They are hung up on high in the vault of the sky, and 
so by Necessity strong 
In the midst of their course, they clash with great force, 
and thunder away without end. 
STREPS. 
But is it not He who compels this to be? does not Zeus 
this Necessity send? 
SOCR. 
No Zeus have we there, but a vortex of air. 
STREPS. 
What! Vortex? that’s something I own. 
I knew not before, that Zeus was no more, but Vortex 
was placed on his throne! 
But I have not yet heard to what cause you referred the 
thunder’s majestical roar. 
SOCR. 
Yes, ’tis they, when on high full of water they fly, and 
then, as I told you before, 
By compression impelled, as they clash, are compelled 
a terrible clatter to make. 
STREPS. 
Come, how can that be? I really don’t see. 
Socr. 
Yourself as my proof I will take. 
Have you never then ate the broth puddings you get 
when the Panathenaea come round, 
And felt with what might your bowels all night in tur- 
bulent tumult resound ? 


METAPHYSICAL CRITICISM 59 


STREPS. 
By Apollo, ’tis true, there’s a mighty to do, and my belly 
keeps rumbling about; 
And the puddings begin to clatter within and to kick up 
a wonderful rout: 
Quite gently at first, papapax, papapax, but soon pap- 
appappax away, 
Till at last, Ill be bound, I can thunder as loud pap- 
apappappappappax as they. 
SOCR. 
Shalt thou then a sound so loud and profound from thy 
belly diminutive send, 
And shall not the high and the infinite sky go thunder- 
ing on without end? 
For both, you will find, on an impulse of wind and 
similar causes depend. 
STREPS. 
Well, but tell me from whom comes the bolt through the 
gloom, with its awful and terrible flashes; 
And wherever it turns, some it singes and burns, and 
some it reduces to ashes: 
For this ’tis quite plain, let who will send the rain, that 
Zeus against perjurers dashes. 
SOCR. 
And how, you old fool, of a dark-ages school, and an 
antediluvian wit, 
If the perjured they strike, and not all men alike, have 
they never Cleonymus hit? 
Then of Simon again, and Theorus explain: known 
perjurers, yet they escape. 
But he smites his own shrine with these arrows divine, 
and ‘“Sunium, Attica’s cape,” 
And the ancient gnarled oaks: now what prompted 
those strokes? They never forswore I should 
say. 


60 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


STREPS. 
Can’t say that they do: your words appear true. 
Whence comes then the thunderbolt, pray? 
SOCR. 
When a wind that is dry, being lifted on high, is sud- 
denly pent into these, 
It swells up their skin, like a bladder, within, by Ne- 
cessity’s changeless decrees. 
Till compressed very tight, it bursts them outright, and 
away with an impulse so strong, 
That at last by the force and the swing of the course, it 
takes fire as it whizzes along. 
STREPS. 
That’s exactly the thing, that I suffered one spring, at 
the great feast of Zeus, I admit: 
I’d a paunch in the pot, but I wholly forgot about mak- 
ing the safety-valve slit. 
So it spluttered and swelled, while the saucepan I held, 
till at last with a vengeance it flew: 
Took me quite by surprise, dung-bespattered my eyes, 
and scalded my face black and blue! + 


Nothing could be more amusing than this passage 
as a burlesque of the physical theories of the 
time; and nothing could better illustrate the quarrel 
between science and religion, as it presents itseif 
on the surface to the plain man. But there is 
more in the quarrel than appears at first sight. 
The real sting of the comedy from which we have 
quoted lies in the assumption, adopted throughout 
the play, that the atheist is also necessarily anti- _ 
| social and immoral. The-physicist, in the person 

+ Aristoph. “Clouds” 358.—Translated by B. B. 
Rogers. 


METAPHYSICAL RECONSTRUCTION 61 


of Socrates, is identified with the sophist; on the 
one hand he is represented as teaching the theory 
of material causation, on the other the art of lying 
and deceit. The object of Strepsiades in attending 
the school is to learn how not to pay his debts; 
the achievement of his son is to learn how to dis- 


honour his father. The cult of reason is identified | 
by the poet with the cult of self-interest; the man | 


who does not believe in the gods cannot, he implies, 
believe in the family or the state. 


§ 16. METAPHYSICAL RECONSTRUCTION—PLATO 


The argument is an old one into whose merits this 
is not the place to enter. But one thing is certain, 
that the sceptical spirit which was invading religion, 
was invading also politics and ethics; and that 
towards the close of the fifth century before Christ, 


Greece and in particular Athens was overrun by | 
philosophers, who not only did not scruple to ques- | 
tion the foundations of social and moral obligation, | 


but in some cases explicitly taught that there were 
no foundations at all; that all law was a convention 
based on no objective truth; and that the only valid 
right was the natural right of the strong to rule. It 
was into this chaos of sceptical opinion that Plato 
was born; and it was the desire to meet and 
subdue it that was the motive of his philosophy. 
Like Aristophanes, he traced the root of the evil 
to the decay of religious belief; and though no 
one, as we have seen, was more trenchant than he 
in his criticism of the popular faith, no one, on 


— - 


62 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


the other hand, was more convinced of the necessity 
of some form of religion as a basis for any stable 
| polity. The doctrine of the physicists, he asserts, 
that the world is the result of ‘nature and chance”’ 
_has immediate and disastrous effects on the whole 
_ Structure of social beliefs. The conclusion inevit- 
ably follows that human laws and institutions, like — 
everything else, are accidental products; that they 
have no objective validity, no binding force on the 
will, and that the only right that has any intelligible 
meaning is the right which is identical with might.’ 
Against these conclusions the whole soul of Plato 
rose in revolt. To reconstruct religion, he was 
driven back upon metaphysics; and elaborated at 
last the system which from his day to our own 
has not ceased to perplex and fascinate the world, 
and whose rare and radiant combination of gifts, 
speculative, artistic, and religious, marks the highest 
reach of the genius of the Greeks, and perhaps of 
mankind. 

To attempt an analysis of that system would lead 
us far from our present task. All that concerns us 
here, is its religious significance; and of that, all we 
can note is that Plato, the deepest thinker of the 
Greeks, was also among the farthest removed from 
the popular faith. The principle from which he 
derives the World is the absolute Good, or God, of 
whose ideas the phenomena of sense are imperfect 
copies. To the divine intelligence man by virtue of 
his reason is akin. But the reason in him has faller 


1 See e.g. Plato’s “Laws” x. 887. 


METAPHYSICAL RECONSTRUCTION 63 


into bondage of the flesh; and it is the task of his 
life on earth, or rather of a series of lives (for Plato 
_ believed in successive re-incarnations), to deliver | 
this diviner element of his soul, and set it free to re- 
unite with God. To the description of the divine: 
life thus prepared for the soul, from which she fell 
but to which she may return, Plato has devoted some 
of his finest passages; and if we are to indicate, as 
we are bound to do, the highest point to which the 
religious consciousness of the Greeks attained, we 
must not be deterred, by dread of the obscurity nec- 
essarily attaching to an extract, from a citation 
from the most impassioned of his dialogues. Speak- 
ing of that “divine madness,” to which we have al- 
ready had occasion to refer, he says that this is the 
madness which “is imputed to him who, when he 
sees the beauty of earth, is transported with the rec- 
ollection of true beauty; he would like to fly away, 
but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and look- 
ing upward and careless of the world below; and he 
is therefore thought to be mad. And I have shown 
this of all inspirations to be the noblest and highest 
and the offspring of the highest to him who has or 
shares in it, and that he who loves the beautiful is 
called a lover because he partakes of it. For every 
soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true 
being; this was the condition of her passing into the 
form of man. But all souls do not easily recall the 
things of the other world; they may have seen them 
for a short time only, or they may have been un- 
fortunate in their earthly lot, and having had their 
hearts turned to unrighteousness through some cor- 


64 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


rupting influence, they may have lost the memory 
of the holy things which once they saw. Few only 
retain an adequate remembrance of them; and they, 
when they behold here any image of that other 
world, are rapt in amazement; but they are ignorant 
of what that rapture means, because they do not 
clearly perceive. For there is no clear light of jus- 
tice or temperance, or any of the higher ideas which 
are precious to souls, in the earthly copies of them; 
they are seen through a glass dimly; and there are 
few who, going to the images, behold in them the 
realities, and these only with difficulty. There was 
a time when, with the rest of the happy band, they 
saw beauty shining in brightness—we philosophers 
following in the train of Zeus, others in company 
with other gods; and then we beheld the beatific 
vision and were initiated into a mystery which may 
be truly called most blessed, celebrated by us in our 
state of innocence, before we had any experience of 
evils to come, when we were admitted to the sight of 
apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy, 
which we beheld shining in pure light, pure ourselves 
and not yet enshrined in that living tomb which we 
carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the body, 
like an oyster in his shell. Let me linger over the 
memory of scenes which have passed away.” + 


§ 17. SUMMARY 


At this point, where religion passes into philoso- 
phy, the discussion which has occupied the present 


1 Plato, Phaedrus. 249 d.—Jowett’s translation. 


SUMMARY 65 


chapter must close. So far it was necessary to pro- 
ceed, in order to show how wide was the range of the 
religious consciousness of the Greeks, and through 
how many points of view it passed in the course of 
its evolution. But its development was away from 
the Greek and towards the Christian; and it will 
therefore be desirable, in conclusion, to fix once more 
in our minds that central and primary phase of the 
Greek religion under the influence of which their 
civilization was formed into a character definite and 
distinct in the history of the world. This phase will 
be the one which underlay and was reflected in the 
actual cult and institutions of Greece, and must 
therefore be regarded not as a product of critical and 
self-conscious thought, but as an imaginative way of 
conceiving the world stamped, as it were, passively 
on the mind by the whole course of concrete ex- 
perience. Of its character we have attempted to 
give some kind of account in the earlier part of this 
chapter, and we have now only to summarize what 
was there said. 

The Greek religion, then, as we saw, in this its 
characteristic phase, involved a belief in a number of 
deities who on the one hand were personifications of 
the powers of nature and of the human soul, on the 
other the founders and sustainers of civil society. 
To the operations of these beings the whole of ex- 
perience was referred, and that, not merely in an 
abstract and unintelligible way, as when we say that 
the world was created by God, but in a more precise 
and definite sense, the actions of the gods being con- 
ceived to be the same in kind as that of man, pro- 


66 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


ceeding from similar motives, directed to similar 
ends, and accomplished very largely by similar, 
though much superior means. By virtue of this un- 
critical and unreflective mode of apprehension the 
Greeks, we said, were made at home in the world. 
Their religion suffused and transformed the facts 
both of nature and of society, interpreting what 
would otherwise have been unintelligible by the idea 
of an activity which they could understand because 
it was one which they were constantly exercising 
themselves. Being thus supplied with a general ex- 
planation of the world, they could put aside the ques- 
tion of its origin and end, and devote themselves 
freely and fully to the art of living, unhampered by 
scruples and doubts as to the nature of life. Con- 
sciousness similar to their own was the ultimate fact; 
and there was nothing therefore with which they 
might not form intelligible and harmonious relations. 

And as on the side of metaphysics they were de- 
livered from the perplexities of speculation, so on 
the side of ethics they were undisturbed by the 
perplexities of conscience. ‘Their religion, it is true, 
had a bearing on their conduct, but a bearing, as we 
saw, external and mechanical. If they sinned they 
might be punished directly by physical evil; and 
from this evil religion might redeem them by the 
appropriate ceremonies of purgation. But on the 
other hand they were not conscious of a spiritual 
relation to God, of sin as an alienation from the 
divine power and repentance as the means of res- 
‘toration to grace. The pang of conscience, the 
fears and hopes, the triumph and despair of the soul 


SUMMARY 67 


which were the preoccupations of the Puritan, were 
phenomena unknown to the ancient Greek. He 
- lived and acted undisturbed by scrupulous intro- 
spection; and the function of his religion was rather 
to quiet the conscience by ritual than to excite it by 
admonition and reproof. 

From both these points of view, the metaphysical 
and the ethical, the Greeks were brought by their 
religion into harmony with the world. Neither the 
perplexities of the intellect nor the scruples of the 
conscience intervened to hamper their free activity. 
Their life was simple, straightforward, and clear; 
and their consciousness directed outwards upon the > 
world, not perplexedly absorbed in the contempla- 
tion of itself. 

On the other hand, this harmony, which was the 
essence of the Greek civilization, was a temporary 
compromise, not a final solution. It depended on 
presumptions of the imagination, not on convictions 
of the intellect; and as we have seen, it destroyed 
itself by the process of its own development. The \ 
beauty, the singleness, and the freedom which at- | 
tracts us in the consciousness of the Greek was the | 
result of a poetical view of the world, which did but ' 
anticipate in imagination an ideal that was not real- 
ized in fact or in thought. It depended on the as- 
sumption of anthropomorphic gods, an assumption 
which could not stand before the criticism of reason, 
and either broke down into scepticism, or was de- 
veloped into the conception of a single supreme and 
spiritual power. 

And even apart from this internal evolution, from 


68 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


this subversion of its ideal basis, the harmony estab- 
lished by the Greek religion was at the best but 
partial and incomplete. It was a harmony for life, 
_but not for death. The more completely the Greek 
felt himself to be at home in the world, the more 
happily and freely he abandoned himself to the ex- 
-ercise of his powers, the more intensely and vividly 
he lived in action and in passion, the more alien, 
«bitter, and incomprehensible did he find the phenom- 
ena of age and death. On this problem, so far as 
we can judge, he received from his religion but little 
light, and still less consolation. The music of his 
brief life closed with a discord unresolved; and even 
before reason had brought her criticism to bear upon 
his creed, its deficiency was forced upon him by his 
feeling. 

Thus the harmony which we have indicated as 
the characteristic result of the Greek religion con- 
tained none of the conditions of completeness or 
finality. For on the one hand there were elements 
which it was never able to include; and on the other, 
its hold even over those which it embraced was tem- 
porary and precarious. The eating of the tree of 
knowledge drove the Greeks from their paradise; 
but the vision of that Eden continues to haunt the 
mind of man, not in vain, if it prophesies in a type 
the end to which his history moves. 


NansnPONnR 


CHAPTER II 


THE GREEK VIEW OF THE STATE 


§ 1. THe GREEK STATE A “City” 


lates present kingdom of Greece is among the 
smallest of European states; but to the Greeks 
it would have appeared too large to be a state at all. 
Within that little peninsula whose whole population 
and wealth are so insignificant according to modern 
ideas, were comprised in classical times not one but 
many flourishing polities. And the conception of 
an amalgamation of thesé under a single government 
to the Greek idea, that even to Aristo- 
tle, the clearest and most comprehensive thinker of 
his age, it did not present itself even as a dream. 
To him, as to every ancient Greek, the state meant 
the City—meant, that is to say, an area about the 
size of an English county, with a population, per- 
haps, of some hundred thousand, self-governing and 
independent of any larger political whole. 

If we can imagine the various County Councils of 
England emancipated from the control of Parlia- 
ment and set free to make their own laws, manage 
their own finances and justice, raise troops and 
form with one another alliances, offensive and de- 
fensive, we may form thus some general idea of the 


———— eae 


70 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


political institutions of the Greeks and some meas- 
ure of their difference from our own. 

Nor must it be supposed that the size of the Greek 
state was a mere accident in its constitution, that it 
might have been indefinitely enlarged and yet re- 
tained its essential character. On the contrary, the 
limitation of size belonged to its very notion. The 


| greatest state, says Aristotle, is not the one whose 
- population is most numerous; on the contrary, after 


a certain limit of increase has been passed, the state 


' ceases to be a state at all. ‘‘Ten men are too few 


for a city; a hundred thousand are too many.” 
Not only London, it seems, but every one of our 
larger towns, would have been too big for the Greek 
idea of a state; and as for the British empire, the 
very conception of it would have been impossible to 
the Greeks. 

Clearly, their view on this point is fundamentally 
different from our own. ‘Their civilization was one 
of “city-states,” not of kingdoms and empires; and 
their whole political outlook was necessarily deter- 
mined by this condition. Generalizing from their 
own experience, they had formed for themselves a 
conception of the state not the less interesting to us 
that it is unfamiliar; and this concepticn it will be 
the business of the present chapter to illustrate and 
explain. 


§ 2. THE RELATION OF THE STATE TO 
THE CITIZEN 


First, let us consider the relation of the state to 
the citizens—that is to say, to that portion of the 


THE STATE AND THE CITIZEN 71 


community, usually a minority, which was possessed 
of full political rights. It is here that we have the 

_ key to that limitation of size which we have seen to 
be essential to the idea of the city-state. For, in, 
the Greek view, to be a citizen of a state did not | 
merely imply the payment of taxes, and the posses- | 
sion of a vote; it implied a direct and active co- | 
operation in all the functions of civil and military | 
life. A citizen was normally a soldier, a judge, and 
a member of the governing assembly; and all his 
public duties he performed not by deputy, but in 
person. He must be able frequently to attend the 
centre of government; hence the limitation of terri- 
tory. He must be able to speak and vote in person 
in the assembly; hence the limitation of numbers. 
The idea of representative government never oc- 
curred to the Greeks; but if it had occurred to them, 
and if they had adopted it, it would have involved 
a revolution in their whole conception of the citizen. 
Of that conception, direct personal service was the | 
cardinal point—service in the field as well as in the! 
council; and to substitute for personal service the 
mere right to a vote would have been to destroy the 
form of the Greek state. 

Such being the idea the Greeks had formed, based 
on their own experience, of the relation of the citizen 
to the state, it follows that to them a society so 
complex as our own would hardly have answered to 
the definition of a state at all. Rather they would 
have regarded it as a mere congeries of unsatisfac- 
tory human beings, held together, partly by political, 
partly by economic compulsion, bat lacking that 


72 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


conscious identity of interest with the community to 
which they belong which alone constitutes the citi- 
zen. A man whose main pre-occupation should be 
with his trade or his profession, and who should 
only become aware of his corporate relations when 
called upon for his rates and taxes—a man, that is 
to say, in the position of an ordinary Englishman— 
would not have seemed to the Greeks to be a full and 


proper member of a state. For the state, to them, 
| was more than a machinery, it was a spiritual bond; 
'and “‘public life,” as we call it, was not a thing to 


) be taken up and laid aside at pleasure, but a neces- 
| sary and essential phase of the existence of a com- 


ts 


f 


plete man. 

This relation of the citizen to the state, as it was 
conceived by the Greeks, is sometimes described as 
though it involved the sacrifice of the individual to 
the whole. And in a certain sense, perhaps, this is 
true. Aristotle, for instance, declares that no one 


| must suppose he belongs to himself, but rather that 


‘all alike belong to the state; and Plato, in the con- 


struction of his ideal republic, is thinking much less 
of the happiness of the individual citizens, than of 
the symmetry and beauty of the whole as it might 
appear to a disinterested observer from without. 
Certainly it would have been tedious and irksome to 
any but his own ideal philosopher to live under the 
rule of that perfect polity. Individual enterprise, 
bent, and choice is rigorously excluded. Nothing 
escapes the net of legislation, from the production of 
children to the fashion of houses, clothes, and food. 
Jt is absurd, says the ruthless logic of this mathema- 


THE STATE AND THE CITIZEN = 73 


tician among the poets, for one who would regulate 
public life to leave private relations uncontrolled; if 
there is to be order at all, it must extend through 
and through; no moment, no detail must be with- 
drawn from the grasp of law. And though in this, 
Plato, no doubt, goes far beyond the common sense 
of the Greeks, yet he is not building altogether in 
the air. The republic which he desiderates was 
realized, as we shall see, partially at Teast, in Sparta. 
So that his insistence on the all-pervading domina- 
tion of the state, exaggerated though it be, is exag- 
gerated on the actual lines of Greek practice, and 
may be taken as indicative of a real distinction and 
even antithesis between their point of view and that 
which prevails at present in most modern states. 

But on the other hand such a phrase as the “‘sacri- 
fice of the individual to the whole,” to this extent at 
least is misleading, that it presupposes an opposition 
between the end of the individual and that of the 
State, such as was entirely foreign to the Greek con- 
ception. The best individual, in their view, was also | 
the best citizen; the two ideals not only were not | 
incompatible, they were almost indistinguishable. - 
When Aristotle defines a state as “an association of! 
similar persons for the attainment of the best life 
possible,’ he implies not only that society is the 
means whereby the individual attains his ideal, but 
also that that ideal includes the functions of public | 
life. The state in his view is not merely the con- 
venient machinery that raises a man above his ani- 
mal wants and sets him free to follow his own de- 
vices; it is itself his end, or at least a part of it. 


74 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


And from this it follows that the regulations of the_ 
state were not regarded by the Greeks—as they are 
apt to be by modern men—as so many vexatious, if 
necessary, restraints on individual liberty; but ra- 
)ther as the expression of the best and highest nature 
of the citizen, as the formula of the conduct which 
the good man would naturally prescribe to himself. 
So that, to get a clear conception of what was at 
least the Greek ideal, however imperfectly it may 
have been attained in practice, we ought to regard 
the individual not as sacrificed to, but rather as 
realizing himself in the whole. We shall thus come 
nearer to what seems to have been the point of view 
not only of Aristotle and of Plato, but also of the 
average Greek man. 


§ 3. THe GREEK VIEW oF LAW 


_ For nothing is more remarkable in the political 
\ theory of the Greeks than the respect they habitually 
- express for law. Early legislators were believed to 
have been specially inspired by the divine power— 
Lycurgus, for instance, by Apollo, and Minos by 
Zeus; and Plato regards it as a fundamental con- 
dition of the well-being of any state that this view 
should prevail among its citizens. Nor was this 
conception of the divine origin of law confined to 
legend and to philosophy; we find it expressed in 
the following passage of Demosthenes, addressed to 
a jury of average Athenians, and representing at any 
rate the conventional and orthodox, if not the critical 
view of the Greek public: 


THE GREEK VIEW OF LAW 75 


“The whole life of men, O Athenians, whether 
they inhabit a great city or a small one, is governed 
by nature and by laws. Of these, nature is a thing 
irregular, unequal, and peculiar to the individual 
possessor; laws are regular, common, and the same 
for all. Nature, if it be depraved, has often vicious 
desires; therefore you will find people of that sort 
falling into error. Laws desire what is just and | 
honourable and useful; they seek for this, and, when 
it is found, it is set forth as a general ordinance, the | 
same and alike for all; and that is law, which all 
men ought to obey for many reasons, and especially 
because every law is an invention and gift of the 
Gods, a resolution of wise men, a corrective of errors 
intentional and unintentional, a compact of the whole 
state, according to which all who belong to the state 
ought to live.” } 

In this opposition of Law, as the universal prin- 
ciple, to Nature, as individual caprice, is implied a 
ta tacit identification of Law and Justice. The identi- 
fication, of course, is never complete in any state, 
and frequently enough i is not even approximate. No 
people were more conscious of this than the Greeks, 
none, as we shall see later, pushed it more vigorously 
home. But still, the positive conception which lay 
at the root of their society was that which finds 
expression in the passage we have quoted, and which 
is stated still more explicitly in the “Memorabilia” 
of Xenophon, where that admirable example of the 
good and efficient citizen represents his hero Socrates 


1Demosth. in Aristogeit. § 17.—Translation by C. 
R. Kennedy. 


76 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


as maintaining, without hesitation or reserve, that 
“that which is in accordance with law is just.” The 
implication, of course, is not that laws cannot be 
improved, that they do at any point adequately cor- 
respond to justice; but that justice has an objective 
and binding validity, and that Law is a serious and 


_ on the whole a successful attempt to embody it in 
' practice. This was the conviction predominant in 


the best period of Greece; the conviction under 
which her institutions were formed and flourished, 
and whose overthrow by the philosophy of a critical 
age was coincident with, if it was not the cause of, 
her decline. 


§ 4. ARTISANS AND SLAVES 


We have now arrived at a general idea of the 
nature of the Greek state, and of its relations to the 
individual citizen. But there were also members of 
the state who were not citizens at all; there was the 


| class of labourers and traders, who, in some states at 
_ least, had no political rights; and the class of slaves 
_who had nowhere any rights at all. For in the Greek 


conception the citizen was an aristocrat. His excel- 
lence was thought to consist in public activity; and 
to the performance of public duties he ought there- 
fore to be able to devote the greater part of his time 


, and energy. But the existence of such a privileged 


\ class involved the existence of a class of producers to 


\ support them; and the producers, by the nature of 
| their calling, be they slave or free, were excluded 


‘from the life of the perfect citizen. They had not 


ARTISANS AND SLAVES 77 


the necessary leisure to devote to public business; 


neither had they the opportunity to acquire the 


_ mental and physical qualities which would enable 
| them to transact it worthily. They were therefore 
regarded by the Greeks as an inferior class; in some 
states, in Sparta, for example, and in Thebes, they 
were excluded from, political rights; and even in 
Athens, the most democratic of all the Greek com- 
munities, though they were admitted to the citizen- 
ship and enjoyed considerable political influence, 
they never appear to have lost the stigma of social 
inferiority. And the distinction which was thus 
more or less definitely drawn in practice between 
the citizens proper and the productive class, was 
even more emphatically affirmed in theory. Aris- 
totle, the most balanced of all the Greek thinkers and 
the best exponent of the normal trend of their ideas, 
excludes the class of artisans from the citizenship 
of his ideal state on the ground that they are de- 
barred by their occupation from the characteristic 
excellence of man. And Plato, though here as else- 
where he pushes the normal view to excess, yet, in 
his insistence on the gulf that separates the citizen 
from the mechanic and the trader, is in sympathy 
with the general current of Greek ideas. His ideal 
state is one which depends mainly on agriculture; 
in which commerce and exchange are reduced to the 
smallest possible dimensions; in which every citizen 
is a landowner, forbidden to engage in trade; and in 
which the productive class is excluded from all poli- 
tical rights. 

The obverse, then, of the Greek citizen, who 





78 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


realized in the state his highest life, was an inferior 
class of producers who realized only the means of 
subsistence. But within this class again was a dis- 
tinction yet more fundamental—the distinction be- 
tween free men and slaves. In the majority of the 
Greek states the slaves were the greater part of the 
population; in Athens, to take an extreme case, at 
the close of the fourth century, they are estimated 
at 400,000 to 100,000 citizens. They were employed 
not only in domestic service, but on the fields, in 
factories and in mines, and performed, in short, a 
considerable part of the productive labour in the 
state. A whole large section, then, of the producers 
in ancient Greece had no social or political rights at 
all. They existed simply to maintain the aristoc- 
racy of citizens, for whom and in whom the state 
had its being. Nor was this state of things in the 
least repugnant to the average Greek mind. Noth- 
ing is more curious to the modern man than the 
temper in which Aristotle approaches this theme. 
Without surprise or indignation, but in the tone of 
an impartial, scientific inquirer, he asks himself the 
question whether slavery is natural, and answers it 
in the affirmative. For, he argues, though in any 
particular case, owing to the uncertain chances of 
fortune and war, the wrong person may happen to 
be enslaved, yet, broadly speaking, the general truth 
remains, that there are some men so inferior to oth- 
ers that they ought to be despotically governed, by 
the same right and for the same good end that the 
body ought to be governed by the soul. Such men, 
he maintains, are slaves by nature; and it is as much 


ARTISANS AND SLAVES 79 


to their interest to be ruled as it is to their masters’ . 
interest to rule them. To this class belong, for ex- | 
ample, all who are naturally incapable of any but | 
physical activity. These should be regarded as de- | 
tachable limbs, so to speak, of the man who owns 
them, instruments of his will, like hands and feet; 
or, to use Aristotle’s own phase, “the slave is a tool 
with life in it, and the tool a lifeless slave.” 

The relation between master and slave thus 
frankly conceived by the Greeks, did not necessarily 
imply, though it was quite compatible with, brutality 
of treatment. The slave might be badly treated, no 
doubt, and very frequently was, for his master had 
almost absolute control over him, life and limb; but, 
as we should expect, it was clearly recognized by 
the best Greeks that the treatment should be genial 
and humane. “There is a certain mutual profit and ' 
kindness,” says Aristotle, “between master and slave, 
in all cases where the’ relation? is natural, not miprely. 
imposed from without by convention or force.” ? 
And Plato insists on the duty of neither insulting | 
‘nor outraging a slave, but treating him rather with | 
even greater fairness than if he were in a position of | 
equality. 

Still, there can be no doubt that the Greek con- 
ception of slavery is one of the points in which their 
view of life runs most counter to our own. Cen- 
turies of Christianity have engendered in us the con- 
viction, or, rather, the instinct, that men are equal at 
least to this extent, that no one has a right explicitly 


SUATELS EON ts) boon) Dita, 


80 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


to make of another a mere passive instrument of his 
_will—that every man, in short, must be regarded as 
an end in himself. Yet even here the divergence be- 
tween the Greek and the modern view is less ex- 
treme than it appears at first sight. For the modern 
man, in spite of his perfectly genuine belief in equal- 
ity (in the sense in which we have just defined the 
word), does, nevertheless, when he is confronted with 
racial differences, recognize degrees of inferiority so 
extreme, that he is practically driven into the Aris- 
totelian position that some men are naturally slaves. 
The American, for example, will hardly deny that 
such is his attitude towards the negro. The negro, 
in theory, is the equal, politically and socially, of 
the white man; in practice, he is excluded from the 
vote, from the professions, from the amenities of 
social intercourse, and even, as we have recently 
learnt, from the most elementary forms of justice. 
The general and @ priori doctrine of equality is shat- 
tering itself against the actual facts; and the old 
Greek conception, “the slave by nature,” may be de- 
tected behind the mask of the Christian ideal. And 
while thus, even in spite of itself, the modern view 
is approximating to that of the Greeks, on the other 
hand the Greek view by its own evolution was al- 
ready beginning to anticipate our own. Even Aris- 
totle, in formulating his own conception of slavery, 
finds it necessary to observe that though it be true 
that some men are naturally slaves, yet in practice, 
under conditions which give the victory to force, it 
may happen that the “natural” slave becomes the 


ARTISANS AND SLAVES 81 


master, and the “natural” master is degraded to a 
slave. This is already a serious modification of his 
doctrine. And other writers, pushing the contention 
further, deny altogether the theory of natural slav- 
ery. ‘‘No man,” says the poet Philemon, “was ever 
born a slave by nature. Fortune only has put men 
in that position.” And Euripides, the most modern 
of the Greeks, writes in the same strain: “One 
thing only disgraces a slave, and that is the name. 
In all other respects a slave, if he be good, is no 
worse than a freeman.” ? 

It seems then that the distinction between the 
Greek and the modern point of view is not so pro- 
found or so final as it appears at first sight. Still, 
the distinction, broadly speaking, is there. The 
Greeks, on the whole, were quite content to sacrifice 
the majority to the minority. Their position, as we 
said at the outset, was fundamentally aristocratic; 
they exaggerated rather than minimized the distinc- 
tions between men—between the Greek and the bar- 
barian, the freeman and the slave, the gentleman and 
the artisan—regarding them as natural and funda- 
mental, not as the casual product of circumstances. 
The “equality” which they sought in a well-ordered 
state was proportional not arithmetical—the attri- 
bution to each of his peculiar right, not of equal 
rights to all. Some were born to rule, others to 
serve; some to be ends, others to be means; and 
the problem to be solved was not how to obliterate 


1 Euripides, Ion. 854. 


82 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


these varieties of tone, but how to compose them 
into an ordered harmony. 

In a modern state, on the other hand, though 
class distinctions are clearly enough marked, yet the 
point of view from which they are regarded is funda- 
. mentally different. They are attributed rather tg 

accidents of fortune than varieties of nature. The 
artisan, for example, ranks no doubt lower than the 
professional man; but no one maintains that he is 
a different kind of being, incapable by nature, as 
Aristotle asserts, of the characteristic excellence of 
; man. The distinction admitted is rather one of 
- wealth than of natural calling, and may be obliter- 
ated by ability and good luck. Neither in theory 
nor in practice does the modern state recognize any 
such gulf as that which, in ancient Greece, separated 
the freeman from the slave, or the citizen from the 
non-citizen. 


§ 5. THE GREEK STATE PRIMARILY MILITARY, 
NOT INDUSTRIAL 


The source of this divergence of view must be 
sought in the whole circumstances and character of 
the Greek states. Founded in the beginning by con- 
quest, many of them still retained, in their internal 
structure, the marks of their violent origin. The 
citizens, for example, of Sparta and of Crete, were 
practically military garrisons, settled in the midst of 
a hostile population. These were extreme cases; 
and elsewhere, no doubt, the distinction between the 


THE STATE PRIMARILY MILITARY 83 


_ conquerors and the conquered had disappeared. 
Still, it had sufficed to mould the conception and 
ideal of the citizen as a member of a privileged and 
superior class, whose whole energies were devoted to 


maintaining, by council and war, not only the pros- 


perity, but the very existence of the state. The orig- 


inal citizen, moreover, would be an owner of land, 
which would be tilled for him by a subject class.' 
Productive labour would be stamped, from the out-' 


set, with the stigma of inferiority; commerce would 
grow up, if at all, outside the limits of the landed 
aristocracy, and would have a struggle to win for it- 
self any degree of social and political recognition. 
Such were the conditions that produced the Greek 
conception of the citizen. In some states, such as 
Sparta, they continued practically unchanged 
throughout the best period of Greek history; in oth- 
ers, such as Athens, they were modified by the 
growth of a commercial population, and where that 
was the case the conception of the citizen was modi- 
fied too, and the whole polity assumed a democratic 


character. Yet never, as we have seen, even in the’ 
most democratic states, was the modern conception | 


of equality admitted. For, in the first place, the 
institution of slavery persisted, to stamp the mass 
of producers as an inferior caste; and in the second 
place, trade, even in the states where it was most 
developed, hardly attained a preponderating in- 
fluence. The ancient state was and remained pri- 
marily military. The great industrial questions 
which agitate modern states either did not exist at all 
in Greece, or assumed so simple a form that they did 


84 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


not rise to the surface of political life.1 How cur- 
ious it is, for example, from the modern point of 
view, to find Plato, a citizen of the most important 
trading centre of Greece, dismissing in the following 
brief sentence the whole commercial legislation of 
his ideal state: 

“As to those common business transactions be- 
tween private individuals in the market, including, 
if you please, the contracts of artisans, libels, as- 
saults, law-proceedings, and the impanelling of ju- 
ries, or again questions relating to tariffs, and the 
collection of such customs as may be necessary in 
the market or in the harbours, and generally all 
regulations of the market, the police, the custom- 
house, and the like; shall we condescend to legislate 
at all on such matters? 

“No, it is not worth while to give directions on 
these points to good and cultivated men: for in most 
cases they will have little difficulty in discovering 
all the legislation required.” 

' In fact, throughout his treatise it is the non- 
commercial or military class with which Plato is al- 
most exclusively concerned; and in taking that line 
he is so far at least in touch with reality that that 
class was the one which did in fact predominate in 
the Greek state; and that even where, as in Athens, 


1'There was, of course, the general opposition between 
rich and poor (see below). But not those infinitely com- 
plex relations which are the problems of modern states- 
manship. 

* Plato, Rep. IV. 425.—Translated by Davies and 
Vaughan. 


THE STATE PRIMARILY MILITARY 85 


_the productive class became an important factor in 
political life, it was never able altogether to over- 
throw the aristocratic conception of the citizen. 

And with that conception, we must add, was 
bound up the whole Greek view of individual excel- 
lence. The inferiority of the artisan and the trader, | 
historically established in the manner we have in-/ 
dicated, was further emphasized by the fact that 
they were excluded by their calling from the cultiva- | 
tion of the higher personal qualities—from the train- 
ing of the body by gymnastics and of the mind by 
philosophy; from habitual conversance with public 
affairs; from that perfect balance, in a word, of the 
physical, intellectual, and moral powers, which was 
only to be attained by a process of self-culture, in- 
compatible with the pursuance of a trade for bread. 
Such, at any rate, was the opinion of the Greeks. 
We shall have occasion to return to it later. Mean- 
time, let us sum up the course of our investigation 
up to the present point. 

We have seen that the state, in the Greek view, 
must be so limited, both in territory and population, 
that all its citizens might be able to participate in 
person in its government and defence; that it was 
based on fundamental class distinctions separating 
sharply the citizen from the non-citizen, and the 
slave from the free; that its end and purpose was 
that all-absorbing corporate activity in which the 
citizen found the highest expression of himself; and 
that to that end the inferior classes were regarded 
aS Mere means—a point of view which finds its com- 
pletest expression in the institution of slavery. 


86 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


§ 6. Forms OF GOVERNMENT IN THE GREEK 
STATE 


While, however, this was the general idea of the 
Greek state, it would be a mistake to suppose that it 
was everywhere embodied in a single permanent form 
of polity. On the contrary, the majority of the 
states in Greece were in a constant state of flux; 
revolution succeeded revolution with startling rapid- 
ity; and in place of a single fixed type what we really 
get is a constant transition from one variety to an- 
other. The general account we have given ought 
therefore to be regarded only as a kind of limiting 
formula, embracing within its range a number of 
polities distinct and even opposed in character. Of 
these polities Aristotle, whose work is based on an 
examination of all the existing states of Greece, rec- 
‘ognizes three main varieties: government by the 
one, government by the few, and government by the 
many; and each of these is subdivided into two 
forms, one good, where the government has regard 
_to the well-being of the whole, the other bad, where 
it has regard only to the well-being of those who 
,govern. The result is six forms, of which three are 
good, monarchy, aristocracy, and what he calls a 
“polity” par excellence; three bad, tyranny, oli- 
garchy, and democracy. Of all these forms we have 
examples in Greek history, and indeed can roughly 
trace a tendency of the state to evolve through the 
series of them. But by far the most important, in 
the historical period, are the two forms known as 


FACTION AND ANARCHY 87 


_ Oligarchy and Democracy; and the reason of their 
importance is that they corresponded roughly to gov- 
ernment by the rich and government by the poor. 
“Rich and poor,” says Aristotle, ‘are the really an- 
tagonistic members of astate. The result is that the 
character of all existing polities is determined by the 
predominance of one or other of these classes, and 
it is the common opinion that there are two polities 
and two only, viz., Democracy and Oligarchy.” ! 
In other words, the social distinction between rich 
and poor was exaggerated in Greece into political 
antagonism. In every state there was an oligarchic 
and a democratic faction; and so fierce was the op- 
position between them, that we may almost say that 
every Greek city was in a chronic state of civil war, 
having become, as Plato puts it, not one city but two, 
‘one comprising the rich and the other the poor, who 
reside together on the same ground, and are always 
plotting against one another.” 


§ 7. FacTION AND ANARCHY 


This internal schism which ran through almost 
every state, came to a head in the great Peloponne- 
sian War witioh divided Greece at the close of the 
fifth century, and in which Athens and Sparta, the 
two chief combatants, represented respectively the 
democratic and the oligarchic principles. Each ap- 


1 Arist. Pol. VI. (IV) 1291 b 8.—Translation by 
Welldon. 

? Plat. Rep. VIII. 551.—Translation by Davies and 
Vaughan. 


88 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


pealed to the kindred faction in the states that were 
opposed to them; and every city was divided against 
itself, the party that was “out” for the moment plot- 
ting with the foreign foe to overthrow the party 
that was “in.” Thus the general Greek conception 
of the ordered state was so far from being realized 
that probably at no time in the history of the civi- 
lized world has anarchy more complete and cynical 
prevailed. 

To appreciate the gulf that existed between the 
ideal and the fact, we have only to contrast such a 
scheme as that set forth in the “Republic” of Plato 
with the following description by Thucydides of the 
state of Greece during the Peloponnesian War: 

“Not long afterwards the whole Hellenic world 
was in commotion; in every city the chiefs of the 
democracy and of the oligarchy were struggling, the 
one to bring in the Athenians, the other the Lace- 
dzmonians. Now in time of peace, men would have 
_had no excuse for introducing either, and no desire 
_ to do so; but when they were at war and both sides 
could easily obtain allies to the hurt of their enemies 
and the advantage of themselves, the dissatisfied 
party were only too ready to invoke foreign aid. 
And revolution brought upon the cities of Hellas 
many terrible calamities, such as have been and al- 
ways will be while human nature remains the same, 
but which are more or less aggravated and differ in 
character with every new combination of circum- 
stances. In peace and prosperity both states and 
individuals are actuated by higher motives, because 
they do not fall under the dominion of imperious 


FACTION AND ANARCHY 89 


necessities; but the war which takes away the com- 
fortable provision of daily life is a hard master, and 
tends to assimilate men’s characters to their condi- 
tions. | 
‘‘When troubles had once begun in the cities, those 
who followed carried the revolutionary spirit farther 
and farther, and determined to outdo the report of 
all who had preceded them by the ingenuity of their 
enterprises and the atrocity of their revenges. The 
meaning of words had no longer the same relation to 
things, but was changed by them as they thought 
proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal cour- \ 
age; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; © 
moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; 
to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic en- 
ergy was the true quality of aman. A conspirator 
who wanted to be safe was a recreant in disguise. 
The lover of violence was always trusted, and his op- 
ponent suspected. He who succeeded in a plot was 
deemed knowing, but a still greater master in craft 
was he who detected one. On the other hand, he 
who plotted from the first to have nothing to do with 
plots was a breaker-up of parties and a poltroon who 
was afraid of the enemy. In a word, he who could 
outstrip another in a bad action was applauded, and 
so was he who encouraged to evil one who had no 
idea of it. The tie of party was stronger than the 
tie of blood, because a partisan was more ready to 
dare without asking why (for party associations are 
not based upon any established law, nor do they 
seek the public good; they are formed in defiance 
of the laws and from self-interest). The seal of 


90 THE GREEK VIEW OF Lira 


good faith was not divine law, but fellowship in 
crime. If an enemy when he was in the ascendant 
offered fair words, the opposite party received them, 
not in a generous spirit, but by a jealous watchful- 
ness of his actions. Revenge was dearer than self- 
preservation. Any agreements sworn to by either 
party, when they could do nothing else, were bind- 
ing as long as both were powerless. But he who 
on a favourable opportunity first took courage and 
struck at his enemy when he saw him off his guard, 
had greater pleasure in a perfidious than he would 
have had in an open act of reverige; he congratulated 
himself that he had taken the safer course, and also 
that he had overreached his enemy and gained the 
prize of superior ability. In general the dishonest 
more easily gain credit for cleverness than the simple 
for goodness; men take a pride in the one, but are 
ashamed of the other. 

“The cause of all these evils was the love of power 
originating in avarice and ambition, and the party- 
spirit which is engendered by them when men are 
fairly embarked in a contest. For the leaders on 
either side used specious names, the one party pro- 
fessing to uphold the Constitutional equality of the 
many, the other the wisdom of an aristocracy, while 
they made the public interests, to which in name 
they were devoted, in reality their prize. Striving 
in every way to overcome each other, they com- 
mitted the most monstrous crimes; yet even these 
were surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges 
which they pursued to the very utmost, neither party 
observing any definite limits either of justice or 


—— 


FACTION AND ANARCHY 91 


public expediency, but both alike making the caprice 
of the moment their law. Either by the help of an 
unrighteous sentence, or grasping power with the 


strong hand, they were eager to satiate the impa- 


tience of party spirit. Neither faction cared for re- 
ligion; but any fair pretense which succeeded in ef- 
fecting some odious purpose was greatly lauded. 
And the citizens who were of neither party fell a 
prey to both; either they were disliked because 
they held aloof, or men were jealous of their sur- 
viving. 


“Thus revolution gave birth to every form of | 


wickedness in Hellas. The simplicity which is so 
large an element in a noble nature was laughed to 
scorn and disappeared. An attitude of perfidious 
antagonism everywhere prevailed; for there was no 
word binding enough, nor oath terrible enough to 
reconcile enemies. Each man was strong only in 
the conviction that nothing was secure; he must look 
to his own safety, and could not afford to trust 
others. Inferior intellects generally succeeded best. 
For aware of their own deficiencies, and fearing the 
capacities of their opponents, for whom they were 
no match in powers of speech, and whose subtle wits 
were likely to anticipate them in contriving evil, 
they struck boldly and at once. But the cleverer 
sort, presuming in their arrogance that they would 
be aware in time, and disdaining to act when they 
could think, were taken off their guard and easily 
destroyed.” ? 

The general indictment thus drawn up by 

* Thuc. III. 82.—Translated by Jowett. 


cencisitaiaasstaee 


a 


92 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


Thucydides is amply illustrated by the events of war 
which he describes. On one occasion, for example, 
the Athenians were blockading Mitylene; the gov- 
ernment, an oligarchy, was driven to arm the people 
for the defence™ the people, having obtained arms, 
immediately demanded political rights, under threat 
of surrendering the city to the foreign foe; and the 
government, rather than concede their claims, sur- 
rendered it themselves. Again, Megara, we learn, 
was twice betrayed, once by the democrats to the 
Athenians, and again by the oligarchs to the Lace- 
demonians. At Leontini the Syracusans were 
called in to drive out the popular party. And at 
Corcyra the people, having got the better of their 
aristocratic opponents, proceeded to a general mas- 
sacre which extended over seven days, with every 
variety of moral and physical atrocity. 

Such is the view of the political condition of 
Greece given to us by a contemporary observer to- 
wards the close of the fifth century, and it is a 
.curious comment on the Greek idea of the state. 
That idea, as we saw, was an ordered inequality, 
/political as well as social; and in certain states, and 
‘notably in Sparta, it was successfully embodied in a 
stable form. But in the majority of the Greek states 
it never attained to more than a fluctuating and 
temporary realization. The inherent contradiction 
was too extreme for the attempted reconciliation; the 
inequalities refused to blend in a harmony of diver- 
gent tones, but asserted themselves in the disso- 
nance of civil war. 


PROPERTY AND COMMUNISTIC IDEAL 93 
§ 8. PROPERTY AND THE CoMMUNISTIC IDEAL 


And, as we have seen, this internal schism of the 


Greek state was as much social as political. The 


“many” and the “few” were identified respectively 
with the poor and the rich; and the struggle was 
thus at bottom as much economic as political. Gov- 


ernment by an oligarchy was understood to mean the _ 
exploitation of the masses by the classes. ‘‘An oli- | 


garchy,” says a democrat, as reported by Thucyd- | 
ides, ‘while giving the people the full share of dan- | 


ger, not merely takes too much of the good things, 
but absolutely monopolizes them.” 1 And, similarly, 


the advent of democracy was held to imply the spo- _ 


liation of the classes in the interest of the masses, 
either by excessive taxation, by an abuse of the judi- 
cial power to fine, or by any other of the semi-legal 
devices of oppression which the majority in power 
have always at their command. This substantial 
identity of rich and poor, respectively, with oligarch 
and democrat may be further illustrated by the fol- 
lowing passage from Aristotle: 

“In consequence of the political disturbances and 
contentions between the commons on the one hand 
and the rich on the other, whichever party happens 
to get the better of its opponents, instead of estab- 
lishing a polity of a broad and equal kind, assumes 
political supremacy as a prize of the victory, and 
sets up either a Democracy or an Oligarchy.” ? 


1Thuc. VI. 32.—Translated by Jowett. 
* Arist. Pol. VI. (IV) 1296 a 27.—Translation by 
Welldon. 


etna 


_ 


94 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


We see, then, that it was the underlying question 


_ of property that infused so strong a rancour into the 
\party struggles of Greece. From the very earliest 


period, in fact, we find it to have been the case that 
political revolution was prompted by economic 
causes. Debt was the main factor of the crisis 
which led to the legislation of Solon; and a re- 
division of the land was one of the measures attrib- 
uted to Lycurgus.1. As population increased, and, 
in the maritime states, commerce and trade devel- 
oped, the problem of poverty became increasingly 
acute; and though it was partially met by the emi- 
gration of the surplus population to colonies, yet in 
the fifth and fourth centuries we find it prominent 
and pressing both in practical politics and in specu- 
lation. Nothing can illustrate better how familiar 
the topic was, and to what free theorizing it had led, 
than the passages in which it is treated in the com- 
edies of Aristophanes. Here, for example, is an ex- 
tract from the ‘‘Ecclesiazuse’’ which it may be 
worth while to insert as a contribution to an argu- 
ment that belongs to every age. 


Praxacora. I tell you that we are all to share 
alike and have everything in common, instead 
of one being rich and another poor, and one 
having hundreds of acres and another not 
enough to make him a grave, and one a houseful 


11 have not thought it necessary for my purpose, here 
or elsewhere, to discuss the authenticity of the statements 
made by Greek authors about Lycurgus. 


PROPERTY AND COMMUNISTIC IDEAL 95 


of servants and another not even a paltry foot- 
boy. Iam going to introduce communism and 
universal equality. 

BLEPSyRUS. How communism? 

PrAx. That’s just what I was going to tell you. 
First of all, everybody’s money and land and 
anything else he may possess will be made com- 
mon property. Then we shall maintain you 
all out of the common stock, with due regard to 
economy and thrift. 

BLEPs. But how about those who have no land, 
but only money that they can hide? 

Prax. It will all go to the public purse. To keep 
anything back will be perjury. 

Biers. Perjury! Well, if you come to that, it was 
by perjury it was all acquired. 

Prax. And then, money won’t be the least use to 
anyone. 

Bieps. Why not? 

Prax. Because nobody will be poor. Everybody 
will have everything he wants, bread, salt-fish, 
barley-cake, clothes, wine, garlands, chickpeas. 
So what will be the good of keeping anything 
back? Answer that if you can! 

BLeps. Isn’t it just the people who have all these 
things that are the greatest thieves? 

Prax. No doubt, under the old laws. But now, 
when everything will be in common, what will 
be the good of keeping anything back? 

Biers. Who will do the field work? 

Prax. The slaves; all you will have to do is to 


96 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


dress and go out to dinner in the evening. 

Biers. But what about the clothes? How are they 
to be provided? 

Prax. What you have now will do to begin with, 
and afterwards we shall make them for you 
ourselves. 

BLEPs. Just one thing more! Supposing a man 
were to lose his suit in the courts, where are the 
damages to come from? It would not be fair to 
take the public funds. 

Prax. But there won’t be any lawsuits at all! 

Bieps. That will mean ruin to a good many peo- 
ple. 

BYSTANDER. Just my idea! 

Prax. Why should there be any? 

Bieps. Why! for reasons enough, heaven knows! 
For instance, a man might repudiate his debts. 

Prax. In that case, where did the man who lent the 
money get it front Clearly, since everything 
is in common, he must have stolen it! 

BLEps. Sohe must! Anexcellent idea! But now 
tell me this. When fellows come to blows over 
their cups, where are the damages to come 
from? 

Prax. From the rations! A man won’t be in such 
a hurry to make a row when his belly has to pay 
for it. 

Bieps. One thing more! Will there be no more 

thieves? 

Prax. Why should anyone steal what is his own? 

Bieps. And won’t one be robbed of one’s cloak at 
night? 


PROPERTY AND COMMUNISTIC IDEAL 97 


Prax. Not if you sleep at home! 

Buieps. Nor yet, if one sleeps out, as one used 
to do? 

Prax. No, for there will be enough and to spare 

| for all. And even if a thief does try <o strip 
a man, he will give up his cloak of his own ac- 
cord. What would be the good of fighting? 
He has only to go and get another, and a bet- 
ter, from the public stores. 

Buieps. And will there be no more gambling? 

Prax. What will there be to play for? 

Breps. And how about house accommodation? 

Prax. That will be the same for all. I tell you I 
am going to turn the whole city into one huge 
house, and break down all the partitions, so 
that everyone may have free access to everyone 
else.+ 


The “social problem,” then, had clearly arisen in 
ancient Greece, though no doubt in an infinitely 
simpler form than that in which it is presented to 
ourselves; and it might perhaps have been expected 
that the Greeks, with their notion of the supremacy 
of the state, would have adopted some drastic public 
measure to meet it. And, in fact, in the earlier 
period of their history, as has been indicated above, 
we do find sweeping revolutions effected in the distri- 
bution of property. In Athens, Solon cancelled debt 
secured on person or property; and in Sparta Lycur- 
gus is said to have resumed the whole of the land 
for the state, and redivided it equally among the 


1 Aristoph. Eccles. 590. 


98 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


citizens. We have also traces of laws existing in 
other states to regulate in the interests of equality 
_ the possession and transfer of land. But it does not 
appear that any attempt was made in any state 
permanently to control by public authority the pro- 
duction and distribution of wealth. 

Meantime, however, the problem of social in- 
equality was exercising the minds of political theor- 
ists; and we have notice of various schemes for an 
ideal polity framed upon communistic principles. 
Of these the most important, and the only one pre- 
served to us, is the celebrated “‘Republic” of Plato; _ 
and never, it may be safely asserted, was a plan of 
society framed so consistent, harmonious and beau- 
tiful in itself, or so indifferent to the actual capacities 
of mankind. Following out what we have already 
indicated as the natural drift of Greek ideas, the 
philosopher separates off on the one hand the pro- 
_ ductive class, who are to have no political rights; 
_and on the other the class of soldiers and governors. 
It is the latter alone with whom he seriously con- 
cerns himself; and the scheme he draws up for 
them is uncompromisingly communistic. After be- 
ing purged, by an elaborate education, of all the 
-egoistic passions, they are to live together, having all 
things in common, devoted heart and soul to the pub- 
lic good, and guiltless even of a desire for any pri- 
‘vate possession or advantage of their own. “In the 
first place, no one,” says Plato, ‘‘ should possess any 
private property, if it can possibly be avoided; sec- 
ondly, no one should have a dwelling or store- 


PROPERTY AND COMMUNISTIC IDEAL 99 


house into which all who please may not enter; 
whatever necessaries are required by temperate and 
courageous men, who are trained to war, they should 
receive by regular appointment from their fellow- 
citizens, as wages for their services, and the amount 
should be such as to leave neither a surplus on the 
year’s consumption nor a deficit; and they should 
attend common messes and live together as men do 
in a camp: as for gold and silver, we must tell them 
that they are in perpetual possession of a divine 
species of the precious metals placed in their souls 
by the gods themselves, and therefore have no need 
of the earthly one; that in fact it would be profana-... 
tion to pollute their spiritual riches by mixing them 
with the po8session of mortal gold, because the 
world’s coinage has been the cause of countless im- 
pieties, whereas theirs is undefiled: therefore to 
them, as distinguished from the rest of the people, 
it is forbidden to handle or touch gold and silver, or 
enter under the same roof with them, or to wear 
them in their dresses, or to drink out of the precious 
metals. If they follow these rules, they will be safe 
themselves and the saviours of the city; but when- 
ever they come to possess lands, and houses, and 
money of their own, they will be householders and 
cultivators instead of guardians, and will become 
hostile masters of their fellow-citizens rather than 
their allies; and so they will spend their whole lives, 
hating and hated, plotting and plotted against, stand- 
ing in more frequent and intense alarm of their 
enemies at home than of their enemies abroad; by 


100 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


which time they and the rest of the city will be run- 
ning on the very brink of ruin.” 4 

The passage is interesting, if only as an illustra- 
tion of the way in which Plato had been impressed 
by the evil results of the institution of private prop- 
erty. But as a contribution to political theory it 
was open to severe attack from the representatives 
of experience and common sense. Of these, the 
chief was Aristotle, whose criticism has been pre- 
served to us, and who, while admitting that Plato’s 
scheme has a plausible appearance of philanthropy, 
maintains that it is inapplicable to the facts of hu- 
man nature. To this conclusion, indeed, even Plato 
himself was driven in the end; for in his later work, 
the “Laws,” although he still asserts that community 
of goods would be the ideal institution, he reluctantly 
abandons it as a basis for a possible state. On the 
other hand, he endeavours by the most stringent_reg- 
ulations, to prevent the growth of inequalities of 
wealth. He distributes the land in equal lots among 
his citizens, prohibiting either purchase or sub- 
division; limits the possession of money to the 
_ amount required for daily exchange; and forbids 
__ lending on interest. The object of a legislator, he 
declares, is to make not a great but a happy city. 
But only the good are happy, and goodness and 
wealth are incompatible. The legislator, therefore, 
will not allow his citizens to be wealthy, any more 
than he will allow them to be poor. He will seek 
to establish by law the happy mean; and to this 


1Plato, Rep. III. 416.—Translation by Davies and 
Vaughan. 


PROPERTY AND COMMUNISTIC IDEAL 101 


end, if he despair of the possibility of a thorough- 
going communism, will legislate at least as indicated 
above. 

The uncompromising idealism of Plato’s scheme, 
with its assumption of the indefinite plasticity of 
human nature, is of course peculiar to himself, not 
typical of Greek ideas. But it is noticeable that 
Aristotle, who is a far better representative of the 
average Greek mind, exhibits the same mistrust of © 
the accumulation of private property. In the be- 
ginning of his “Politics” he distinguishes two kinds 
of money-making, one natural, that which is pur- 
sued for the sake of a livelihood, the other unnatural, 
that which is pursued for the sake of accumulation. 
“The motive of this latter,” he says, “is a desire 
for life instead of for good life’; and its most hate- 
ful method is that of usury, the unnatural breeding 
of money out of money. And though he rejects as 
impracticable the compulsory communism of Plato’s 
“Republic,” yet he urges as the ideal solution that 
property, while owned by individuals, should be held 
as in trust for the common good; and puts be- 
fore the legislator the problem: ‘so to dispose the 
higher natures that they are unwilling; and the 
lower that they are unable to aggrandize them- 
selves.” 1 

Such views as these, it may be noted, interesting 
though they be, as illustrating how keenly the think- 
ers of ancient Greece had realized the drawbacks 
of private property, have but the slightest bearing 


1 Aristotle, Pol. II. 7. 1267 b 6.—Translation by 
Welldon. 


102 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


on the conditions of our own time. The complexity 
and extent of modern industry have given rise to 
quite new problems, and quite new schemes for their 
solution; and especially have forced into prominence 
the point of view of the producers themselves. To 
Greek thinkers it was natural to approach the ques- 
tion of property from the side of the governing class 
or of the state as a whole. The communism of 
Plato, for example, applied only to the ‘‘guardians” 
and soldiers, and not to the productive class on 
whom they depended; and so completely was he 
pre-occupied with the former to the exclusion of the 
latter, that he dismisses in a single sentence, as un- 
worthy the legislator’s detailed attention, the whole 
apparatus of labour and exchange. To regard the 
“working-class” as the most important section of the 
community, to substitute for the moral or political 
the economic standpoint, and to conceive society 
merely as a machine for the production and distri- 
bution of wealth, would have been impossible to an 
ancient Greek. Partly by the simplicity of the eco- 
nomic side of the society with which he was ac- 
quainted, partly by the habit of regarding the la- 
bouring class as a mere means to the maintenance 
of the rest, he was led, even when he had to deal 
with the problem of poverty and wealth, to regard 
it rather from the point of view of the stability 
and efficiency of the state, than from that of the 
welfare of the producers themselves. The modern 
attitude is radically different; a revolution has been 
effected both in the conditions of industry and in the 
way in which they are regarded; and the practice and 


SPARTA 103 


the speculation of the Greek city-states have for us 
an interest which, great as it is, is philosophic rather 
than practical. 


§ 9. SPARTA 


The preceding attempt at a general sketch of the 
nature of the Greek state is inevitably loose and 
misleading to this extent, that it endeavours to com- 
prehend in a single view polities of the most varied 
and discrepant character. To remedy, as far as 
may be, this defect, to give an impression, more def- 
inite and more complete, of the variety and scope 
of the political experience of the Greeks, let us 
examine a little more in detail the character of the 
two states which were at once the most prominent 
and the most opposed in their achievement and their 


aim—the state of Sparta on the one hand, and that ' 
of Athens on the other. It was these two cities that 
divided the hegemony of Greece; they represent the 
extremes of the two forms—oligarchy and democ-, 


racy—under which, as we saw, the Greek polities 
fall; and from a sufficient Neouaintance with them 
we may gather a fairly complete idea of the whole 
range of Greek political life. 

In Sparta we see one extreme of the political 
development of Greece, and the one which ap- 
proaches nearest, perhaps, to the characteristic 
Greek type. Of that type, it is true, it was an ex- 
aggeration, and was recognized as such by the best 
thinkers of Greece; but just for that reason it is 
the more interesting and instructive as an exhibi- 


_— 


104 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


tion of a distinctive aspect of Greek civilization. 
| The Spartan state was composed of a small body 
of citizens—the Spartiatae or Spartans proper—en- 
' camped in the midst of a hostile population to whom 

they allowed no political rights and by whose labour 
_ they were supplied with the necessaries of life. The 
distinction between the citizen class on the one hand 
and the productive class on the other was thus as 
clearly and sharply drawn as possible. It was even 
exaggerated; for the citizens were a band of con- 
querors, the productive class a subject race, per- 
petually on the verge of insurrection, and only kept 
in restraint by such measures as secret assassination. 
The result was to draw together the small band of 
Spartiatae into a discipline so rigorous and close that 
under it everything was sacrificed to the necessity 
of self-preservation; and the bare maintenance of 
the state became the end for which every individual 
was born, and lived, and died. This discipline, ac- 
cording to tradition, had been devised by a single 
legislator, Lycurgus, and it was maintained intact 
for several centuries. Its main features may be 
summarized as follows: 

The production and rearing of children, to begin 
at the beginning, instead of being left to the caprice 
of individuals, was controlled and regulated by the 
state. ‘The women, in the first place, were trained 
by physical exercise for the healthy performance of 
the duties of motherhood; they were taught to run 
and wrestle naked, like the youths, to dance and 
sing in public, and to associate freely with men. 
Marriage was permitted only in the prime of life; 


SPARTA 105 


and a free intercourse, outside its limits, between 
healthy men and women, was encouraged and ap- 
proved by public opinion. Men who did not marry 
were subject to social and civic disabilities. The 
children, as soon as they were born, were submitted 
to the inspection of the elders of their tribe; if 
strong and well formed, they were reared; if not, 
they were allowed to die. 

A healthy stock having been thus provided as a 
basis, every attention was devoted to its appropriate 
training. The infants were encouraged from the 
beginning in the free use of their limbs, unhampered 
by swaddling-clothes, and were accustomed to en- 
dure without fear darkness and solitude, and to cure 
themselves of peevishness and crying. At the age of 
seven the boys were taken away from the charge 
of their parents, and put under the superintendence 
of a public official. Their education, on the intel- 
lectual side, was slight enough, comprising only such 
rudiments as reading and writing; but on the moral 
side it was stringent and severe. Gathered into 
groups under the direction of elder youths—‘‘moni- 
tors” we might call them—they were trained to a 
discipline of iron endurance. One garment served 
them for the whole year; they went without shoes, 
and slept on beds of rushes plucked with their own 
hands. Their food was simple, and often enough 
they had to go without it. Every moment of the 
day they were under inspection and supervision, for 
it was the privilege and the duty of every citizen to 
admonish and punish not only his own but other 
people’s children. At supper they waited at table 


106 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


on their elders, answered their questions and endured 
their jests. In the streets they were taught to walk 
in silence, their hands folded in their cloaks, their 
eyes cast down, their heads never turning to right 
or left. Their gymnastic and military training wag 
incessant; wherever they met, we are told, they be- 
gan to box; under the condition, however, that they 
were bound to separate at the command of any by- 
stander. To accustom them early to the hardships 
of a campaign, they were taught to steal their food 
from the mess-tables of their elders; if they were 
detected they were beaten for their clumsiness, and 
went without their dinner. Nothing was omitted, on 
the moral or physical side, to make them efficient 
members of a military state. Nor was the disci- 
pline relaxed when they reached years of maturity. 
For, in fact, the whole city was a camp. Family 
life was obliterated by public activity. The men 
dined together in messes, rich and poor alike, shar- 
ing the same coarse and simple food. Servants, 
dogs, and horses, were regarded as common prop- 
erty. Luxury was strictly forbidden. The only 
currency in circulation was of iron, so cumbrous that 
it was impossible to accumulate or conceal it. The 
houses were as simple as possible, the roofs shaped 
only with the axe, and the doors with the saw; the 
furniture and fittings corresponded, plain but per- 
fectly made. The nature of the currency practically 
prohibited commerce, and no citizen was allowed to 
; be engaged in any mechanical trade. Agriculture 
_ was the main industry, and every Spartan had, or 
| was supposed to have, a landed estate, cultivated by 


SPARTA 107 


serfs who paid him a yearly rent. In complete ac- 
cordance with the Greek ideal, it was a society of 
soldier-citizens, supported by an inferior productive 
class. 

In illustration of this point the following curious 
anecdote may be quoted from Plutarch. During 
one of the wars in which Sparta and her allies were 
engaged, the allies complained that they, who were 
the majority of the army, had been forced into a 
quarrel which concerned nobody but the Spartans. 
Whereupon Agesilaus, the Spartan king, “devised 
this expedient to show the allies were not the greater 
number. He gave orders that all the allies, of 
whatever country, should sit down promiscuously on 
one side, and all the Lacedemonians on the other: 
which being done, he commanded a herald to pro- 
claim, that all the potters of both divisions should 
stand out; then all the blacksmiths; then all the 
masons; next the carpenters; and so he went through 
all the handicrafts. By this time almost all the 
allies were risen, but of the Lacedemonians not a 
man, they being by law forbidden to learn any 
mechanical business; and now Agesilaus laughed 
and said, “You see, my friends, how many more 
soldiers we send out than you do.’ 

And certainly, so far as its immediate ends were 
concerned, this society of soldier-citizens was singu- 
larly successful. The courage and efficiency of 
Spartan troops were notorious, and were maintained 
indeed not only by the training we have described, 
but by social penalties attached to cowardice. A 


* Plut. Agesilaus——Translation by Clough. 


108 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


man who had disgraced himself in battle was a pa- 
_ Yiah in his native land. No one would eat with him, 
no one would wrestle with him; in the dance he must 
take the lowest place; he must give the wall at 
meetings in the street, and resign his seat even to 
younger men; he must dress and bear himself hum- 
bly, under penalty of blows, and suffer the re- 
proaches of women and of boys. Death plainly 
would be preferable to such a life; and we are not 
surprised to hear that the discipline and valour of 
Spartan troops was celebrated far and wide. Here 
is a description of them, given by one of them- 
selves to the Persian king when he was projecting the 
invasion of Greece: 

“Brave are all the Greeks who dwell in any Do- 
rian land; but what I am about to say does not con- 
cern all, but only the Lacedemonians. First, then, 
come what may, they will never accept thy terms, 
which would reduce Greece to slavery; and further, 
they are sure to join battle with thee, though all the 
rest of Greece should submit to thy will. As for 
their numbers, do not ask how many they are, that 
their resistance should be a possible thing; for if a 
thousand of them should take the field, they will 
meet thee in battle, and so will any number, be it 
less than this, or be it more. 

‘When they fight singly, they are as good men as 
any in the world, and when they fight in a body, they 
are the bravest of all. For though they be freemen, 
they are not in all respects free; Law is the master 
whom they own; and this master they fear more 
than thy subjects fear thee. Whatever he com- 


SPARTA 109 


mands they do; and his commandment is always the 
same: it forbids them to flee in battle, whatever the 
number of their foes, and requires them to stand 
firm, and either to conquer or die.” } 

The practical illustration of this speech is the bat- 
tle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans kept at bay 
the whole Persian host, till they were betrayed from 
the rear and killed fighting to a man. 

The Spartan state, then, justified itself according 
to its own ideal; but how limited that ideal was will 
be clear from our sketch. The individual, if it can- | 
not be said that he was sacrificed to the state—for | 
he recognized the life of the state as his own—was | 
at any rate starved upon one side of his nature as | 
much as he was hypertrophied upon the other. | 
Courage, obedience, and endurance were developed 
in excess; but the free play of passion and thought, 
the graces and arts of life, all that springs from the 
spontaneity of nature, were crushed out of existence 
under this stern and rigid rule. “None of them,” 
says Plutarch, an enthusiastic admirer of the Spar- 
tan polity, ‘‘none of them was left alone to live as 
he chose; but passing their time in the city as though 
it were a camp, their manner of life and their avoca- 
tions ordered with a view to the public good, they 
regarded themselves as belonging, not to themselves, 
but to their country.” ? And Plato, whose ideal re- 
public was based so largely upon the Spartan model, 
has marked nevertheless as the essential defect of 


1 Herodotus VII. 102, 4.—Translation by Rawlinson. 
2 Plut. Lycurgus, ch. 24. 


110 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


their polity its insistence on military virtue to the 
exclusion of everything else, and its excessive accen- 
tuation of the corporate aspect of life. ‘Your mili- 
tary way of life,” he says, ‘is modelled after the 
| camp, and is not like that of dwellers in cities; and 
_ you have your young men herding and feeding to- 
_ gether like young colts. No one takes his own in- 
dividual colt and drags him away from his fellows 
against his will, raging and foaming; and gives him 
a groom for him alone, and trains and rubs him down 
privately, and gives him the qualities in education 
which will make him not only a good soldier, but 
also a governor of a state and of cities. Such a one 
would be a greater warrior than he of whom Tyrtzus 
sings; and he would honour courage everywhere, but 
. always as the fourth, and not as the first part of 
\ virtue, either in individuals or state.” 1 

_ The Spartan state, in fact, by virtue of that ex- 
_cellence which was also its defect—the specializing 
of the individual on the side of discipline and rule— 
carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. 
The tendencies which Lycurgus had endeavoured to 
repress by external regulation reasserted themselves 
in his despite. He had intended once for all both 
to limit and to equalize private property; but al- 
ready as early as the fifth century Spartans had ac- 
cumulated gold which they deposited in temples in 
foreign states; the land fell, by inheritance and gift, 
into the hands of a small minority; the number of 
the citizens was reduced, not only by war, but by 


1 Plato, Laws. II. 666 e.—Translation by Jowett. 


ATHENS 111 


the disfranchisement attending inability to contrib- 
ute to the common mess-tables; till at last we find no 
more than 700 Spartan families, and of these no 
more than 100 possessing estates in land. 

And this decline from within was hastened by ex- 
ternal events. The constitution devised for a small 
state encamped amidst a hostile population, broke 
down under the weight of imperial power. The con- 
quest of Athens by Sparta was the signal of her own 
collapse. The power and wealth she had won at a 
stroke alienated her sons from her discipline. Gen- 
erals and statesmen who had governed like kings the 
wealthy cities of the east were unable to adapt them- 
selves again to the stern and narrow rules of Lycur- 
gus. ‘They rushed into freedom and enjoyment, into 
the unfettered use of their powers, with an energy 
proportional to their previous restraint. The fea- 
tures of the human face broke through the fair but 
lifeless mask of ancient law; and the Spartan, ceas- 
ing to be a Spartan, both rose and fell to the level 
of a man. 


§ 10. ATHENS 


In the institutions of Sparta we see, carried to \ 
its farthest point, one side of the complex Greek 
nature—their capacity for discipline and law. 
Athens, the home of a different stock, gives us the 
other extreme—their capacity for rich and spon- 
taneous individual development. To pass from 
Sparta to Athens, is to pass from a barracks to a 
playing-field. All the beauty, all the grace, all the 
joy of Greece; all that chains the desire of mankind, 


112 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


with a yearning that is never stilled, to that one 
golden moment in the past, whose fair and balanced 
interplay of perfect flesh and soul no later gains of 
thought can compensate, centres about that bright 
and stately city of romance, the home of Pericles 
and all the arts, whence from generation to genera- 
tion has streamed upon ages less illustrious an influ- 
ence at once the sanest and the most inspired of all 
that have shaped the secular history of the world. 
Girt by mountain and sea, by haunted fountain and 
sacred grove, shaped and adorned by the master 
hands of Pheidias and Polygnotus and filled with 
the breath of passion and song by Euripides and 
Plato, Athens, famed alike for the legended deeds of 
heroes and gods and for the feats of her human sons 
in council, art, and war, is a name, to those who have 
felt her spell, more familiar and more dear than any 
of the few that mark with gold the sombre scroll of 
history. And still across the years we feel the throb 
of the glorious verse that broke in praise of his na- 
tive land from the lips of Euripides: 


“Happy of yore were the children of race divine, 

Happy the sons of old Erechtheus’ line 
Who in their holy state 
With hands inviolate 

Gather the flower of wisdom far-renowned, 

Lightly lifting their feet in the lucid air 

Where the sacred nine, the Pierid Muses, bare 
Harmonia golden-crowned. 


There in the wave from fair Kephisugs flowing 
Kupris sweetens the winds and sets them blowing 


ATHENS 113 


Over the delicate land; 

And ever with joyous hand 
Braiding her fragrant hair with the blossom of roses, 
She sendeth the Love that dwelleth in Wisdom’s place 
That every virtue may quicken and every grace 

In the hearts where she reposes.”’ * 


And this, the Athens of poetry and art, is but an- 
other aspect of the Athens of political history. The 
same individuality, the same free and passionate | 
energy that worked in the hearts of her sculptors’ 
and her poets, moulded also and inspired her city 
life. In contradistinction to the stern and rigid dis- | 
cipline of Sparta, the Athenian citizen displayed the 
resource, the versatility and the zeal that only free- 
dom and self-reliance can teach. The contrast is 
patent at every stage of the history of the two states, 
and has been acutely set forth by Thucydides in the 
speech which he puts into the mouths of the Corin- 
thian allies of Sparta: 

“You have never considered,” they say to the 
Lacedemonians, ‘“‘what manner of men are these 
Athenians with whom you will have to fight, and how 
utterly unlike yourselves. They are revolutionary, 
equally quick in the conception and in the execution 
of every new plan; while you are conservative—care- 
ful only to keep what you have, originating nothing, 
and not acting even when action is most necessary. 
They are bold beyond their strength; they run risks © 
which prudence would condemn; and in the midst 
of misfortunes they are full of hope. Whereas it is 


1Eurip. Medea, 825- 


114 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


your nature, though strong, to act feebly; when your 
plans are most prudent, to distrust them; and when 
calamities come upon you, to think that you will 
never be delivered from them. ‘They are impetuous, 
and you are dilatory; they are always abroad, and 
you are always at home. For they hope to gain 
something by leaving their homes; but you are 
afraid that any new enterprise may imperil what 
you have already. When conquerors, they pursue 
their victory to the utmost; when defeated, they fall 
back the least. Their bodies they devote to their 
country as though they belonged to other men; their 
true self is their mind, which is most truly their own 
when employed in her service. When they do not 
carry out an intention which they have formed, they 
seem to have sustained a personal bereavement; 
when an enterprise succeeds, they have gained a 
mere instalment of what is to come; but if they fail, 
they at once conceive new hopes and so fill up the 
void. With them alone to hope is to have, for they 
lose not a moment in the execution of an idea. This 
is the life-long task, full of danger and toil, which 
they are always imposing upon themselves. None 
enjoy their good things less, because they are always 
seeking for more. To do their duty is their only 
holiday, and they deem the quiet of inaction to be as 
disagreeable as the most tiresome business. If a 
man should say of them, in a word, that they were 
born neither to have peace themselves nor to allow 
peace to other men, he would simply speak the 
truth.” 3 
*Thuc. I. 70.—Translated by Jowett. 


ATHENS 115 


The qualities here set forth by Thucydides as 
characteristic of the Athenians, were partly the 
cause and partly the effect of their political constitu- 
tion. The history of Athens, indeed, is the very 
antithesis to that of Sparta. In place of a type fixed 
at a stroke and enduring for centuries, she presents 
a series of transitions through the whole range of 
polities, to end at last in a democracy so extreme 
that it refuses to be included within the limits of the 
general formula of the Greek state. 

Seldom, indeed, has ‘‘equality” been pushed to so 
extreme a point as it was, politically at least, in 
ancient Athens. The class of slaves, it is true, ex- 
isted there as in every other state; but among the 
free citizens, who included persons of every rank, no 
political distinction at all was drawn. All of them, 
from the lowest to the highest, had the right to speak 
and vote in the great assembly of the people which 
was the ultimate authority; all were eligible to every 
administrative post; all sat in turns as jurors in the 
law-courts. The disabilities of poverty were mini- 
mized by payment for attendance in the assembly 
and the courts. And, what is more extraordinary, 
even distinctions of ability were levelled by the prac- 
tice of filling all offices, except the highest, by lot. 

Had the citizens been a class apart, as was the 
case in Sparta, had they been subjected from the 
cradle to a similar discipline and training, forbidden 
to engage in any trade or business, and consecrated 
to the service of the state, there would have been 
nothing surprising in this uncompromising assertion 
of equality. But in Athens the citizenship was ex- 


116 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


tended to every rank and calling: the poor man 
jostled the rich, the shopman the aristocrat, in the 
Assembly; cobblers, carpenters, smiths, farmers, 
merchants, and retail traders met together with the 
ancient landed gentry, to debate and conclude on 
national affairs; and it was from such varied ele- 
ments as these that the lot impartially chose the 
officials of the law, the revenue, the police, the high- 
ways, the markets, and the ports, as well as the 
jurors at whose mercy stood reputation, fortune, and 
life. The consequence was that in Athens, at least 
in the later period of her history, the middle and 
lower classes tended to monopolize political power. 
Of the popular leaders, Cleon, the most notorious, 
was a tanner; another was a baker, another a cattle- 
dealer. Influence belonged to those who had the 
gift of leading the mass; and in that competition the 
man of tongue, of energy, and of resource, was more 
than a match for the aristocrat of birth and intellect. 

The constitution of Athens, then, was one of 
political equality imposed upon social inequality. 
To illustrate the point we may quote a passage from 
Aristophanes which shows at once the influence 
exercised by the trading class and the disgust with 
which that influence was regarded by the aristocracy 
whom the poet represents. The passage is taken 
from the “Knights,” a comedy written to discredit 
Cleon, and turning upon the expulsion of the no- 
torious tanner from the good graces of Demos, by 
the superior impudence and address of a sausage- 
seller. Demosthenes, a general of the aristocratic 


ATHENS 117 


party, is communicating to the latter the destiny 
that awaits him. 


DEMOSTHENES (to the SAUSAGE-SELLER gravely). 
Set these poor wares aside; and now—bow down 
To the ground; and adore the powers of earth and 
heaven. 
S.-S. Heigh-day! Why, what do you mean? 
DEM. O happy man! 
Unconscious of your glorious destiny, 
Now mean and unregarded; but to-morrow, 
The mightiest of the mighty, Lord of Athens. 
S.-S. Come, master, what’s the use of making game? 
Why can’t ye let me wash my guts and tripe, 
And sell my sausages in peace and quiet? 
_ Dem. O simple mortal, cast those thoughts aside! 
Bid guts and tripe farewell! Look here! Behold! 
(pointing to the audience) 
The mighty assembled multitude before ye! 
5.-5. (with a grumble of indifference). 
I see ’em. 
Dem. You shall be their lord and master, 
The sovereign and the ruler of them all, 
Of the assemblies and tribunals, fleets and armies; 
You shall trample down the Senate under foot, 
Confound and crush the generals and commanders, 
Arrest, imprison, and confine in irons, 
And feast and fornicate in the Council House. 
S.-S. Are there any means of making a great man 
Of a sausage-selling fellow such as I? 
Dem. ‘The very means you have, must make ye so, 
Low breeding, vulgar birth, and impudence, 
These, these must make ye, what you’re meant to be. 
S.-S. I can’t imagine that I’m good for much. 


118 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


Dem. Alas! But why do ye say sop What’s the 
meaning 
Of these misgivings? I discern within ye 
A promise and an inward consciousness 
Of greatness. Tell me truly: are ye allied 
To the families of gentry? 
S.-S. Naugh, not I; 
I’m come from a common ordinary kindred, 
Of the lower order. 
Dem. What a happiness! 
What a footing will it give ye! What a groundwork 
For confidence and favour at your outset! 
S.-S. But bless ye! only consider my education! 


I can but barely read . . . in a kind of way. 
Dem. That makes against ye!—the only thing 
against ye— 


The being able to read, in any way: 

For now no lead nor influence is allowed 

To liberal arts or learned education, 

But to the brutal, base, and underbred. 
Embrace then and hold fast the promises 
Which the oracles of the gods announce to you. 


We have here an illustration, one among many 
that might be given, of the political equality that 
prevailed in Athens. It shows us how completely 
that distinction between the military or governing, 
and the productive class, which belonged to the 
normal Greek conception of the state, had been 
broken down, on the side at least of privilege and 
right, though not on that of social estimation, in this 
most democratic of the ancient states. Politically, 
the Athenian trader and the Athenian artisan was 


1 Aristoph. Knights. 155.—Translation by Frere. 


ATHENS 119 


the equal of the aristocrat of purest blood; and so | 
far the government of Athens was a genuine | 
democracy. 

But so far only. For in Athens, as in every Greek 
state, the greater part of the population was unfree; 
and the government, which was a democracy from 
the point of view of the freeman, was an, oligarchy 
from the point of view of the slave. For the slaves, 
by the nature of their position, had no political 
rights; and they were more than half of the popula- 
tion. It is noticeable, however, that the freedom 
and individuality which was characteristic of the 
Athenian citizen, appears to have reacted favourably 
on the position of the slaves. Not only had they, 
to a certain extent, the protection of the law against 
the worst excesses of their master's, but they were 
allowed a license of bearing and costume which 
would not have been tolerated in any other state. 
A contemporary writer notes that in dress and 
general appearance Athenian slaves were not to be 
distinguished from citizens, that they were permitted 
perfect freedom of speech; and that it was open 
to them to acquire a fortune and to live in ease and 
luxury. In Sparta, he says, the slave stands in fear 
of the freeman, but in Athens this is not the case; 
and certainly the bearing of the slaves introduced, 
into the Athenian comedy does not indicate any 
undue subservience. Slavery at the best is an un- | 
democratic institution; but in Athens it appears to’ 
have been made as democratic as its nature would > 
admit. \ 
We find, then, in the Athenian state, the concepe 


120 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


tion of equality pushed to the farthest extreme at all 
compatible with Greek ideas; pushed, we may fairly 
say, at last to an undue excess; for the great 
days of Athens were those when she was still under 
the influence of her aristocracy, and when the 
popular zeal evoked by her free institutions was 
directed by members of the leisured and cultivated 
class. The most glorious age of Athenian history 
closes with the death of Pericles; and Pericles was 
a man of noble family, freely chosen, year after year, 
by virtue of his personal qualities, to exercise over 
this democratic nation a dictatorship of character 
and brain. It is into his mouth that Thucydides has 
put that great panegyric of Athens, which sets forth 
to all time the type of an ideal state and the record 
of what was at least partially achieved in the great- 
est of the Greek cities: 

“Our form of government does not enter into 
rivalry with the institutions of others. We do not 
copy our neighbours, but are an example to them. 
It is true that we are called a democracy, for the 
administration is in the hands of the many and not 
of the few. But while the law secures equal justice 
to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of 
excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is 
in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the 
public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as 
the reward of merit. Neither is poverty a bar, but 
a man may benefit his country whatever be the 
obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusive- 
ness in our public life, and in our private intercourse 
we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with 


ATHENS 121 


our neighbour if he does what he likes; we do not 
put on sour looks at him, which, though harmless, 
are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained 
in our private intercourse, a spirit of reverence 
pervades our public acts; we are prevented from 
doing wrong by respect for authority and for the 
laws, having an especial regard for those which are 
ordained for the protection of the injured, as weil as | 
for those unwritten laws which bring upon the trans- 
gressor of them the reprobation of the general 
sentiment. Gi nT 

“And we have not forgotten to provide for our 
weary spirits many relaxations from toil; we have 
regular games and sacrifices throughout the year; | 
at home the style of our life is refined; and the 
delight which we daily feel in all these things helps 
to banish melancholy. Because of the greatness of 
our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon 
us, so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as 
freely as of our own. 

‘“;hen, again, our military training is in many 
respects superior to that of our adversaries. Our 
city is thrown open to the worid, and we never expel 
a foreigner or prevent him from seeing or learning 
anything of which the secret if reveaied to an enemy 
might profit him. We rely not upon management | 
and trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands. | 
And in the matter of education, whereas they from 
early youth are always undergoing laborious exer- 
cises which are to make them brave, we live at ease), 
and yet are ready to face the perils which they face. ° 

“Tf, then, we prefer to meet danger with a light 


122 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


| heart but without laborious training, and with a 
courage which is gained by habit and not enforced 
by law, are we not greatly the gainers? Since we do 
not anticipate the pain, although when the hour 
comes, we can be as brave as those who never allow 
themselves to rest; and thus too our city is equally 
admirable in peace and in war. For we are lovers 
of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we 
cultivate the mind without loss of manliness. 
Wealth we employ, not for talk and ostentation, but 
when there is a real use for it. To avow poverty 
with us is no disgrace; the true disgrace is in doing 
nothing to avoid it. An Athenian citizen does not 
neglect the state because he takes care of his own 
household; and even those of us who are engaged 
‘in business have a very fair idea of politics. We: 
alone regard a man who takes no interest in public 
_ affairs, not as a harmless, but as a useless character; 
and if few of us are originators, we are all sound 
judges of a policy. The great impediment to action 
is, in our opinion, not discussion but the want of 
that knowledge which is gained by discussion 
preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar 
power of thinking before we act, and of acting too, 
whereas other men are courageous from ignorance 
but hesitate upon reflection. And they are surely 
to be esteemed the bravest spirits who have the clear- 
est sense of the pains and pleasures of life, but do 
not on that account shrink from danger. 

“To sum up, I say that Athens is the school of 
Hellas, and that the individual Athenian in his own 
person seems to have the power of adapting himself 


ATHENS 123 


to the most varied forms of action with the utmost 
versatility and grace. This is no passing and idle 
word, but truth and fact; and the assertion is veri: 
fied by the position to which these qualities have 
raised the state. For in the hour of trial Athens 
alone among her contemporaries is superior to the | 
report of her. No enemy who comes against her is 
indignant at the reverses which he sustains at the 
hands of such a city; no subject complains that his 
masters are unworthy of him. And we shall as- 
suredly not be without witnesses; there are mighty 
monuments of our power which will make us the 
wonder of this and of succeeding ages: we shall not 
need the praises of Homer or of any other pane- 
gyrist, whose poetry may please for the moment, al- 
though his representation of the facts will not bear 
the light of day. For we have compelled every land, 
every sea, to open a path for our valour, and have 
everywhere planted eternal memorials of our friend- 
ship and of our enmity.” ? 

An impression so superb as this it is almost a pity 
to mar with the inevitable complement of disaster 
and decay. But our account of the Athenian polity 
would be misleading and incomplete if we did not 
indicate how the idea of equality, on which it turned, | 
defeated itself, as did, in Sparta, the complementary | 
idea of order, by the excesses of its own develop- | 
ment. Already before the close of the fifth century, — 
and with reiterated emphasis in the earlier decades 
of the fourth, we hear from poets and orators praise 


1Thuc. II. 37.—Translated by Jowett. 


124 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


of a glorious past that is dead, and denunciations of 
a decadent present. The ancient training in gym- 
nastics, we are told, the ancient and generous culture 
of mind and soul, is neglected and despised by a 
generation of traders; reverence for age and author- 
ity, even for law, has disappeared; and in the train of 
these have gone the virtues they engendered and nur- 
tured. Cowardice has succeeded to courage, dis- 
order to discipline; the place of the statesman is 
usurped by the demagogue; and instead of a nation 
of heroes, marshalled under the supremacy of the 
wise and good, modern Athens presents to view a 
disordered and competitive mob, bent only on 
turning each to his own personal advantage the 
now corrupt machinery of administration and 
law. 

And however much exaggeration there may be in 
these denunciations and regrets, we know enough of 
the interior working of the institutions of Athens to 
see that she had to pay in license and in fraud the 
bitter price of equality and freedom. ‘That to the 
influence of disinterested statesmen succeeded, as 
the democracy accentuated itself, the tyranny of un- 
scrupulous demagogues, is evidenced by the testi- 
mony, not only of the enemies of popular govern- 
ment, but by that of a democrat so convinced as 
Demosthenes. ‘Since these orators have ap- 
peared,” he says, “who ask, What is your pleasure? 
what shall I move? how can I oblige you? the pub- 
lic welfate is complimented away for a moment’s 
popularity, and these are the results; the orators 
thrive, you are disgraced. . . . Anciently the peo- 


ATHENS 125 


ple, having the courage to be soldiers, controlled the 
statesmen and disposed of all emoluments; any of 
the rest were happy to receive from the people his 
Share of honour, office, or advantage. Now, con- 
trariwise, the statesmen dispose of emoluments; 
through them everything is done; you, the people, 
enervated, stripped of treasure and allies, are be- 
come as underlings and hangers-on, happy if these 
persons dole you out show-money or send you 
paltry beeves; and, the unmanliest part of all, you | 
are grateful for receiving your own.” ! | 

And this indictment is amply confirmed from 
other sources. We know that the populace was de- 
moralized by payments from the public purse; that 
the fee for attendance in the Assembly attracted 
thither, as ready instruments in the hands of am- 
bitious men, the poorest and most degraded of the 
citizens; that the fees of jurors were a not unimpor- 
tant addition to the income of an indigent class, who 
had thus a direct interest in the multiplication of 
suits; and that the city was infested by a race of 
“sycophants,” whose profession was to manufacture 
frivolous and vexatious indictments. Of one of 
these men Demosthenes speaks as follows: 

“Ale cannot show any respectable or honest em- 
ployment in which his life is engaged. His mind is 
not occupied in promoting any political good: he at- 
tends not to any trade, or husbandry, or other busi- 
ness; he is connected with no one by ties of humanity 
or social union: but he walks through the market- 


1Dem. Ol]. I1I.—Translation by Kennedy. 


126 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


place like a viper or a scorpion, with his sting up- 
lifted, hastening here and there, and looking out for 
someone whom he may bring into a scrape, or fasten 
some calumny or mischief upon, and put in alarm in 
order to extort money.” + 

From all this we may gather an idea of the way 
in which the Athenian democracy by its own devel- 
opment destroyed itself. Beginning, on its first 
emergence from an earlier aristocratic phase, with 
an energy that inspired without shattering the forms 
of discipline and law, it dissolved by degrees this 
coherent whole into an anarchy of individual wills, 
drawn deeper and deeper, in pursuit of mean and 
egoistic ends, into political fraud and commercial 
chicanery, till the tradition of the gentleman and 
“the soldier was choked by the dust of adventurers 
and swindlers, and the people, whose fathers had 
fought and prevailed at Marathon and Salamis, fell 
as they deserved, by treachery from within as much 
as by force from without, into the grasp of the 
Macedonian conqueror. 


§ 11. ScEPTICAL CRITICISM OF THE BASIS OF 
THE STATE 


Having thus supplemented our general account of 
the Greek conception of the state by a description 
of their two most prominent polities, it remains for 
us in conclusion briefly to trace the negative criticism 


1 Demosth. in Aristogeit. A. 62.—Translation by Ken- 
nedy. 


THE BASIS OF THE STATE 127 


under whose attack that conception threatened to 
dissolve. 

We have quoted, in an earlier part of this chapter, 
a striking passage from Demosthenes, embodying 
that view of the objective validity of law under which 
alone political institutions can be secure. ‘That is 
law,” said the orator, “which all men ought to obey 
for many reasons, and especially because every law 
is an invention and gift of the gods, a resolution of 
wise men, a correction of errors intentional and un- 
intentional, a compact of the whole state, according 
to which all who belong to the state ought to live.” 
That is the conception of law which the citizens 
of any stable state must be prepared substantially 
to accept, for it is the condition of that fundamental 
belief in established institutions which alone can 
make it worth while to adapt and to improve them. 
It was, accordingly, the conception tacitly, at least, 
accepted in Greece, during the period of her con- 
structive vigour. But it is a conception constantly 
open to attack. For law, at any given moment, 
even under the most favourable conditions, cannot 
do more than approximate to its own ideal. It is, 
at best, but a rough attempt at that reconciliation of 
conflicting interests towards which the reason of 
mankind is always seeking; and even in well-ordered 
states there must always be individuals and classes 


who resent, and rightly resent it, as unjust. But the, 
Greek states, as we have seen, were not well ordered; | 
on the contrary, they were always on the verge, or | 


in the act, of civil war; and the conception of law, as 
‘fa compact of the whole state, according to which all 


ow 


128 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


who belong to the state ought to live,’’ must have 
been, at the least, severely tried, in cities perma- 
nently divided into two factions, each intent not 
merely on defeating the other, but on excluding it 
altogether from political rights. Such conditions, in 
fact, must have irresistibly suggested the criticism, 
which always dogs the idea of the state, and against 
which its only defence is in a perpetual perfection of 
itself—the criticism that law, after all, is only the 
rule of the strong, and justice the name under which 
they gloze their usurpation. That is a point of view 
which, even apart from their political dissensions, 
would hardly have escaped the subtle intellect of the 
Greeks; and, in fact, from the close of the fifth cen- 
tury onwards, we find it constantly canvassed and 
discussed. 

The mind of Plato, in particular, was exercised 
_by this contention; and it was, one may say, a main 
_ object of his teaching to rescue the idea of justice 
from identification with the special interest of the 
strong, and re-affirm it as the general interest of all. 
‘For this end, he takes occasion to state, with the 
utmost frankness and lucidity, the view which it is 
his intention to refute; and consequently it is in 
his works that we find the fullest exposition of the 
destructive argument he seeks to answer. 

Briefly, that argument runs as follows: It is the 
law of nature that the strong shall rule; a law which 
everyone recognizes in fact, though everyone repudi- 
ates it in theory. Government therefore simply 
means the rule of the strong, and exists, no matter 
what its form, whether tyranny, oligarchy, or democ- 


THE BASIS OF THE STATE 129 


racy, in the interests not of its subjects but of itself. 
“Justice” and “law” are the specious names it em- 
ploys to cloak its own arbitrary will; they have no 
objective validity, no reference to the well-being of 
all; and it is only the weak and the foolish on whom 
they impose. Strong and original natures sweep 
away this tangle of words, assert themselves in de- 
fiance of false shame, and claim the right divine 
that is theirs by nature, to rule at their will by vir- 
tue of their strength. “Each government,” says 
Thrasymachus in the Republic, “has its laws framed, 
to suit its own interests; a democracy making dem- 
ocratic laws; an autocrat despotic laws, and so | 
on. Now by this procedure these governments have - 
pronounced that what is for the interest of them- 
selves is just for their subjects; and whoever de- 
viates from this, is chastized by them as guilty of 
illegality and injustice. Therefore, my good sir, my 
meaning is, that in all cities the same thing, namely, 
the interest of the established government is just. 
And superior strength, I presume, is to be found on 
the side of government. So that the conclusion of 
right reasoning is, that the same thing, namely, the 
interest of the stronger, is everywhere just.” ? 

Here is an argument which strikes at the root of 
all subordination to the state, setting the subject 
against the ruler, the minority against the majority, 
with an emphasis of opposition that admits of no 
conceivable reconciliation. And, as we have no- 
ticed, it was an argument to which the actual politi- 


1 Plato, Rep. 338.—Translated by Davies and Vaughan. 


130 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


cal conditions of Greece gave a strong show of 
plausibility. 

How then did the constructive thinkers of Greece 
attempt to meet it? 

The procedure adopted by Plato is curiously op- 
posed to that which might seem natural to a modern 
thinker on politics. The scepticism which was to 
be met, having sprung from the extremity of class- 
antagonism, it might be supposed that the cure would 
be sought in some sort of system of equality. 
\ Plato’s idea is precisely the contrary. The distinc- 
_tion between classes he exaggerates to its highest 
_ point; only he would have it depend on degrees, 

‘not of wealth, but of excellence. In the ideal repub- 
lic which he constructs as a type of a state where 
justice should really rule, he sets an impassable gulf 
between the governing class and the governed; each 
is specially trained and specially bred for its appro- 
priate function; and the harmony between them is 
ensured by the recognition, on either part, that each 
is in occupation of the place for which it is naturally 
fitted in that whole to which both alike are subordi- 
nate. Such a state, no doubt, if ever it had been 
realized in practice, would have been a complete 
reply to the sceptical argument; for it would have 
established a “justice”? which was the expression not 
of the caprice of the governing class, but of the ob- 
jective will of the whole community. But in prac- 
tice such a state was not realized in Greece; and 
the experience of the Greek world does not lead us 
to suppose that it was capable of realization. The 
system of sterotyping classes—in a word, of caste— 


THE BASIS OF THE STATE 131 


which has played so great a part in the history of the 
world, does no doubt embody a great truth, that of 
natural inequality; and this truth, as we saw, was 
at the bottom of that Greek conception of the state, 
of which the ‘Republic’ of Plato is an idealizing 
caricature. But the problem is to make the in- 
equality of nature really correspond to the inequality 
imposed by institutions. This problem Plato hoped 
to solve by a strict public control of the marriage re- 
lation, so that none should be born into any class 
who were not naturally fitted to be members of it; 
but, as a matter of fact, the difficulty has never been 
met; and the system of caste remains open to the 
reproach that its “justice” is conventional and arbi- 
trary, not the expression of the objective nature and 
will of all classes and members of the community. 
The attempt of Aristotle to construct a state that 
should be the embodiment of justice is similar to 
Plato’s so far as the relation of classes is concerned. 
He, too, postulates a governing class of soldiers and 
councillors, and a subject class of productive labour- 
ers. When, however, he turns from the ideal to 
practical politics, and considers merely how to avoid 
the worst extremes of party antagonism, his solution 
is the simple and familiar one of the preponderance 
of the middle class. The same view was dominant 
both in French and English politics from the year 
1830 onwards, and is only now being thrust aside by 
the democratic ideal. In Greece it was never real- 
ized except as a passing phase in the perpetual flux 
of polities. And in fine it may be said that the 
problem of establishing a state which should be a 


132 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


concrete refutation of the sceptical criticism that 
“justice” is merely another name for force, was one 
that was never solved in ancient Greece. The dis- 
solution of the idea of the state was more a symptom 
than a cause of its failure in practice to harmonize 
its warring elements. And Greece, divided into con- 
flicting polities, each of which again was divided 
within itself, passed on to Macedon and thence to 
Rome that task of reconciling the individual and the 
class with the whole, about which the political his- 
tory of the world turns. 


§ 12. SUMMARY 


We have now given some account of the general 
character of the Greek state, the ideas that underlay 
it, and the criticism of those ideas suggested by the 
course of history and formulated by speculative 
thought. It remains to offer certain reflections on 
the political achievement of the Greeks, and its re- 
Jation to our own ideas. 

The fruitful and positive aspect of the Greek 
state, that which fastens upon it the eyes of later 
generations as upon a model, if not to be copied, at 
least to be praised and admired, is that identifica- 
tion of the individual citizen with the corporate life, 
which delivered him from the narrow circle of per- 
sonal interests into a sphere of wider views and 
higher aims. The Greek citizen, as we have seen, in 
the best days of the best states, in Athens for ex- 
ample in the age of Pericles, was at once a soldier 
and a politician; body and mind alike were at his 


SUMMARY 133 


country’s service; and his whole ideal of conduct 
was inextricably bound up with his intimate and 
personal participation in public affairs. If now with 
this ideal we contrast the life of an average citizen 
in a modern state, the absorption in private business 
and family concerns, the “greasy domesticity” (to 
use a phrase of Byron’s), that limits and clouds his 
vision of the world, we may well feel that the Greeks 
had achieved something which we have lost, and 
may even desire to return, so far as we may, upon 
our steps, and to re-establish that interpenetration 
of private and public life by which the individual 
citizen was at once depressed and glorified. 

It may be doubted, however, whether such a pro- 
cedure would be in any way possible or desirable. 
For in the first place, the existence of the Greek 
citizen depended upon that of an inferior class who 
were regarded not as ends in themselves, but as 
means to his perfection. And that is an arrange- 
ment which runs directly counter to the modern 
ideal. All modern societies aim, to this extent at 
least, at equality, that their tendency, so far as it is 
conscious and avowed, is not to separate off a privi- 
leged class of citizens, set free by the labour of oth- 
ers to live the perfect life, but rather to distribute 
impartially to all the burdens and advantages of the 
state, so that every one shall be at once a labourer 
for himself and a citizen of the state. But this 
ideal is clearly incompatible with the Greek concep- 
tion of the citizen. It implies that the greater por- 
tion of every man’s life must be devoted to some 
kind of mechanical labour, whose immediate connec- 


134 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


tion with the public good, though certain, is remote 
and obscure; and that in consequence a deliberate 
and unceasing preoccupation with the end of the 
state becomes as a general rule impossible. 

And, in the second place, the mere complexity and 
size of a modern state is against the identification of 
the man with the citizen. For, on the one hand, 
public issues are so large and so involved that it is 
only a few who can hope to have any adequate com- 
prehension of them; and on the other, the sub- 
division of functions is so minute that even when a 
man is directly employed in the service of the state 
his activity is confined to some highly specialized de- 
partment. He must choose, for example, whether he 
will be a clerk in the treasury or a soldier; but he 
cannot certainly be both. In the Greek state any 
citizen could undertake, simultaneously or in suc- 
cession, and with complete comprehension and mas- 
tery, every one of the comparatively few and sim- 
ple public offices; in a modern state such an ar- 
rangement has become impossible. The mere me- 
chanical and physical conditions of our life pre- 
clude the ideal of the ancient citizen. 

But, it may be said, the activity of the citizen of 
a modern state should be and increasingly will be 
concerned not with the whole but with the part. 
By the development of local institutions he will 
come, more and more, to identify himself with the 
public life of his district and his town; and will 
bear to that much the same relation as was borne by 
the ancient Greek to his city-state. Certainly so far 
as the limitation of area and the simplicity and in- 


SUMMARY 135 


telligibility of issues is concerned, such an analogy 
might be fairly pressed; and it is probably in con- 
nection with such local areas that the average citizen 
does and increasingly will become aware of his 
corporate relations. But, on the other hand, it can 
hardly be maintained that public business in this 
restricted sense either could or should play the part 
in the life of the modern man that it played in that 
of the ancient Greek. For local business after all is 
a matter of sewers and parks; and however great the 
importance of such matters may be, and however 
great their claim upon the attention of competent 
men, yet the kind of interest they awaken and the 
kind of faculties they employ can hardly be such as 
to lead to the identification of the individual ideal 
with that of public activity. The life of the Greek 
citizen involved an exercise, the finest and most com- 
plete, of all his powers of body, soul, and mind; the’ 
same can hardly be said of the life of a county 
councillor, even of the best and most conscientious of 
them. And the conclusion appears to be, that that 
fusion of public and private life which was involved 
in the ideal of the Greek citizen, was a passing phase 
in the history of the world; that the state can never 
occupy again the place in relation to the individual 
which it held in the cities of the ancient world; and 
that an attempt to identify in a mudern state the | 
ideal of the man with that of the citizen, would be © 
an historical anachronism, 

Nor is this’a conclusion which need be regretted. 
For as the sphere of the state shrinks, it is possible 
that that of the individual may be enlarged. ‘The 


136 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


public side of human life, it may be supposed, will 
become more and more mechanical, as our under- 
standing and control of social forces grow. But 
every reduction to habit and rule of what were once 
spiritual functions, implies the liberation of the 
higher powers for a possible activity in other re- 
gions. And if advantage were taken of this oppor- 
tunity, the inestimable compensation for the con- 
traction to routine of the life of the citizen would be 
the expansion into new spheres of speculation and 
passion of the freer and more individual life of the 
man. 


CHAPTER III 
THE GREEK VIEW OF THE INDIVIDUAL 


§ 1. THe GREEK VIEW OF MANUAL LABOUR 
AND ‘TRADE 


N our discussion of the Greek view of the state we 
noticed the tendency both of the theory and the 
| , practice of the Greeks to separate the citizens proper | 
from the rest of the community as a distinct and | 
aristocratic class. And this tendency, we had occa- 
sion to observe, was partly to be attributed to the 
high conception which the Greeks had formed of the 
proper excellence of man, an excellence which it was 
the function of the citizen to realize in his own per- 
son, at the cost, if need be, of the other members 
of the state. This Greek conception of the proper 
excellence of man it is now our purpose to examine 
more closely. 

The chief point that strikes us about the Greek | 
ideal is its comprehensiveness. Our own word) 
“virtue” is applied only to moral qualities; but the » 
Greek word which we so translate should properly 
be rendered “excellence,” and includes a reference 
to the body as well as to the soul. A beautiful 
soul, housed in a beautiful body, and supplied with 
all the external advantages necessary to produce and 


perpetrate such a combination—that is the Greek 
137 


138 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


conception of well-being; and it is because labour 
with the hands or at the desk distorts or impairs the 
body, and the petty cares of a calling pursued for 
bread pervert_the soul, that so strong a contempt 
was felt by the Greeks for manual labour and trade. 
“The arts that are called mechanical,” says Xeno- 
phon, “are also, and naturally enough, held in bad 
repute in our cities. For they spoil the bodies of 
workers and superintendents alike, compelling them 
to live sedentary indoor lives, and in some cases 
even to pass their days by the fire. And as their 
bodies become effeminate, so do their souls also grow 
less robust. Besides this, in such trades one has no 
leisure to devote to the care of one’s friends or of 
one’s city. So that those who engage in them are 
thought to be bad backers of their friends and bad 
defenders of their country.”+ In a similar spirit 
Plato asserts that a life of drudgery disfigures the 
body and mars and enervates the soul; ? while Aris- 
totle defines a mechanical trade as one which 
“renders the body and soul or intellect of free per- 
sons unfit for the exercise and practice of virtue;” * 
and denies to the artisan not merely the proper 
excellence of man, but any excellence of any kind, 
on the plea that his occupation and status is un- 
natural, and that he misses even that reflex of hu- 
man virtue which a slave derives from his intimate 
connection with his master.* 


Lx er Oeaci LM. oi. 

* Plato, Rep. 495. 

8 Arist. Pol. V. 1337 b 8.—Translated by Welldon. 
* Ibid. I. 1260 a 34. 


APPRECIATION OF EXTERNAL GCODS 139 


If, then, the artisan was excluded from the 
citizenship in some of the Greek states, and even 
in the most democratic of them never altogether 
threw off the stigma of inferiority attaching to his 
trade, the reason was that the life he was com- 
pelled to lead was incompatible with the Greek 
conception of excellence. That conception we will 
now proceed to examine a little more in detail. 


§ 2. APPRECIATION OF EXTERNAL Goops 


In the first place, the Greek ideal required for 
its realization a solid basis of external Goods. 
It recognized frankly the dependence of man upon 
the world of sense, and the contribution to his 
happiness of elements over which he had at best 
but a partial control. Not that it placed his Good 
outside himself, in riches, power, and other such 


_ 
—_—— 


fortune as necessary means to his self-development. 
Of these the chief were, a competence, to secure} 
him against sordid cares, health, to ensure his, 
physical excellence, and children, to support and ' 
protect him in old age. Aristotle’s definition of 
the happy man is “one whose activity accords with 
perfect virtue and who is adequately furnished with 
external goods, not for a casual period of time 
but for a complete or perfect life-time;” + and he 
remarks, somewhat caustically, that those who say 


1 Arist. Ethics. I. 11. 1101 a 14.—tTranslated by 
Welldon 


140 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


that a man on the rack would be happy if only 
he were good, intentionally or unintentionally are 
talking nonsense. ‘That here, as elsewhere, Aristotle 
represents the common Greek view we have abund- 
ant testimony from other sources. Even Plato, 
in whom there runs so clear a vein of asceticism, 
follows the popular judgment in reckoning high 
among Goods, first, health, then beauty, then skill 
and strength in physical exercises, and lastly wealth, 
if it be not blind but illumined by the eye of reason. 
To these Goods must be added, to complete the 
' scale, success and reputation, topics which are the 
constant theme of the poets’ eulogy. ‘“Two things 
alone there are,” says Pindar, ‘“‘that cherish life’s 
bloom to its utmost sweetness amidst the fair 
flowers of wealth—to have good success and to win 
therefore fair fame;” 1 and the passage represents 
his habitual attitude. That the gifts of fortune, 
both personal and external, are an essential condi- 
tion of excellence, is an axiom of the point of view 
of the Greeks. But on the other hand we never 
find them misled into the conception that such gifts 
are an end in themselves, apart from the personal 
qualities they are meant to support or adorn. The 
‘oriental ideal of unlimited wealth and power, en- 
joyed merely for its own sake, never appealed to 
their fine and lucid judgment. Nothing could 
better illustrate this point than the anecdote re- 
lated by Herodotus of the interview between Solon 
and Croesus, King of Lydia. Croesus, proud of 


1 Pind. Isth. IV. 14.—Translated by E. Myers. 


PHYSICAL QUALITIES 141 


his boundless wealth, asks the Greek stranger who 
is the happiest man on earth? expecting to hear in 
reply his own name. Solon, however, answers with 
the name of Tellus, the Athenian, giving his rea- 
sons in the following speech: 

“First, because his country was flourishing in his 
days, and he himself had sons both beautiful and 
good, and he lived to see children born to each of 
them, and these children all grew up; and further 
because, after a life spent in what our people look 
upon as comfort, his end was surpassingly glorious. 
In a battle between the Athenians and their neigh- 
bours near Eleusis, he came to the assistance of 
his countrymen, routed the foe, and died upon the 
field most gallantly. The Athenians gave him a 
public funeral on the spot where he fell, and paid 
him the highest honours.” 3 

Later on in the discussion Solon defines the happy 
man as he who “is whole of limb, a stranger to 
disease, free from misfortune, happy in his children, 
and comely to look upon,” and who also ends his life 
well. 


§ 3. APPRECIATION OF PHYSICAL QUALITIES 


While, however, the gifts of a happy fortune are 
an essential condition of the Greek ideal, they are 
not to be mistaken for the ideal itself. “A beauti- 
ful soul in a beautiful body,’ to recur to our 
former phrase, is the real end and aim of their 


1 Herodotus, I. 30. 32.—Translated by Rawlinson. 


142 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


endeavour. ‘Beautiful and good” is their habitual 

way of describing what we should call a gentleman; 

and no expression could better represent what they 

admired. With ourselves, in spite of our addiction _ 
to athletics, the body takes a secondary place; 

aiter a certain age, at least, there are few men 

who make its systematic cultivation an important 

factor of their life; and in our estimate of merit 

physical qualities are accorded either none or the 
very smallest weight. It was otherwise with the 

\Greeks; to them a good body was the necessary 

‘correlative of a good soul. Balance was what they 
‘aimed at, balance and harmony; and they could 
scarcely believe in the beauty of the spirit, unless 

it were reflected in the beauty of the flesh. The 
point is well put by Plato, the most spiritually 

minded of the Greeks, and the least apt to under- 

prize the qualities of the soul. 

“Surely then,” he says, ‘to him who has an eye 
to see, there can be no fairer spectacle than that 
of a man who combines the possession of moral 
' beauty in his soul with outward beauty of form, 
corresponding and harmonizing with the former, 
_ because the same great pattern enters into both. 

“There can be none so fair. 

“And you will grant that what is fairest is love- 
liest ? 

“Undoubtedly it is. 

“Then the truly musical person will love those 
who combine most perfectly moral and physical 
beauty, but will not love any one in whom there 
is dissonance. 


GREEK ATHLETICS 143 


“No, not if there be any defect in the soul, but 
if it is only a bodily blemish, he may so bear with 
it as to be willing to regard it with complacency. 

“T understand that you have now, or have had, 
a favourite of this kind; so I give way.” } 

The reluctance of the admission that a physical 
defect may possibly be overlooked is as significant 
as the rest of the passage. Body and soul, it is 
clear, are regarded as aspects of a single whole, 
so that a blemish in the one indicates and involves 
a blemish in the other. The training of the body 
is thus, in a sense, the training of the soul, and 
gymnastic and music, as Plato puts it, serve the 
same end, the production of a harmonious tem- 
perament. 


§ 4. GREEK ATHLETICS 


It is this conception which gives, or appears at 
least in the retrospect to give, a character so 


gracious and fine to Greek athletics. In fact, if\ 
we look more closely into the character of the public | 


games in Greece we see that they were so sur- 
rounded and transfused by an atmosphere of 
imagination that their appeal must have been as 
much to the esthetic as to the physical sense. For 
in the first place those great gymnastic contests in 
which all Hellas took part, and which gave the 
tone to their whole athletic life, were primarily 
religious festivals. The Olympic and Nemean 


1 Plato, Rep. 402.—Translated by Davies and Vaughan. 


\ 


144 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


Games were held in honour of Zeus, the Pythian, 
of Apollo, the Isthmean, of Poseidon. In the en- 
closures in which they took place stood temples 
of the gods; and sacrifice, prayer, and choral hymn 
were the background against which they were set. 
And since in Greece religion implied art, in the 
wake of the athlete followed the sculptor and the 
poet. The colossal Zeus of Pheidias, the wonder 
of the ancient world, flashed from the precincts of 
Olympia its glory of ivory and gold; temples and 
statues broke the brilliant light into colour and 
form; and under that vibrating heaven of beauty, 
the loveliest nature crowned with the finest art, 
shifted and shone what was in itself a perfect type 
of both, the grace of harmonious motion in naked 
youths and men. For in Greek athletics, by virtue 
of the practice of contending nude, the contest 
itself became a work of art; and not only did 
sculptors draw from it an inspiration such as has 
been felt by no later age, but to the combatants 
themselves, and the spectators, the plastic beauty 
of the human form grew to be more than its 
prowess or its strength, and gymnastic became a 
training in esthetics as much as, or more than, in 
physical excellence. 

And as with the contest, so with the reward, 
everything was designed to appeal to the sensuous 
imagination. The prize formally adjudged was 
symbolical only, a crown of olive; but the real 
triumph of the victor was the ode in which his 
praise was sung, the procession of happy comrades, 


GREEK ATHLETICS 145 


and the evening festival, when, as Pindar has it, 
“the lovely shining of the fair-faced moon beamed 
forth, and all the precinct sounded with songs of 
festal glee,” 1 or “beside Kastaly in the evening his 
name burnt bright, when the glad sounds of the 
Graces rose.” ” 

Of the Graces! for these were the powers who 
presided over the world of Greek athletics. Here, 
for example, is the opening of one of Pindar’s odes, 
typical of the spirit in which he at least conceived 
the functions of the chronicler of sport: 

“O ye who haunt the land of goodly steeds that 
drinketh of Kephisos’ waters, lusty Orchomenos’ 
Queens renowned in song, O Graces, guardians of 
the Minyai’s ancient race, hearken, for unto you I 
pray. For by your gift come unto men all pleasant 
things and sweet, and the wisdom of a man and his 
beauty, and the splendour of his fame. Yea, even 
gods without the Graces’ aid rule never at feast 
or dance; but these have charge of all things done 
in heaven, and beside Pythian Apollo of the golden 
bow they have set their thrones, and worship the 
eternal majesty of the Olympian Father. O lady 
Aglaia, and thou Euphrosyne, lover of song, chil- 
dren of the mightiest of the gods, listen and hear, 
and thou Thalia, delighting in sweet sounds, and 
look down upon this triumphal company, moving 
with light step under happy fate. In Lydian mood 


1Pindar, Ol. XI. 90.—Translated by Myers. 
? Pindar, Nem. VI. 65. 


146 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


of melody concerning Asopichos am I come hither 
to sing, for that through thee, Aglaia, in the Olympic 
games the Minyai’s home is winner.” ? 

This is but a single passage among many that 
might be quoted to illustrate the point we are en- 
deavouring to bring into reliefi—the conscious pre- 
dominance in the Greek games of that element of 
poetry and art which is either not present at all in 
modern sport or at best is a happy accessory of 
chance. The modern man, and especially the 
Englishman, addicts. himself to athletics, as to © 
other avocations, with a certain stolidity of gaze 
on the immediate end which tends to confine him to 
the purely physical view of his pursuit. The Greek, 
an artist by nature, lifted his not less strenuous 
sports into an air of finer sentiment, touched them 
with the poetry of legend and the grace of art and 
song, and even to his most brutal contests—for 
brutal some of them were—imparted so rich an 
atmosphere of beauty, that they could be admitted 
as fit themes for dedication to the Graces by the 
choice and spiritual genius of Pindar. 


§ 5. GREEK EtHIcs—IDENTIFICATION OF THE 
AESTHETIC AND ETHICAL PoINTs OF VIEW 


And as with the excellence of the body, so with 
that of the soul, the conception that dominated the 
mind of the Greeks was primarily esthetic. In 
speaking of their religion we have already remarked 


+ Pindar, Ol. XIV.—Translated by Myers 


GREEK ETHICS 147 


that they had no sense of sin; and we may now 
add that they had not what we are apt to mean 
by a sense of duty. Moral virtue they conceived 
not as obedience to an external law, a sacrifice of, 
the natural man to a power that in a sense is alien 
to himself, but rather as the tempering into due 
proportion of the elements of which human nature 
is composed. The good man was the man who was 
beautiful—beautiful in soul. “Virtue,” says Plato, 
“will be a kind of health and beauty and good habit 
of the soul; and vice will be a disease and deformity 
and sickness of it.” 1 It follows that it is as natural 
to seek virtue and to avoid vice as to seek health 
and to avoid disease. There is no question of a 
struggle between opposite principles; the dis- 
tinction of good and evil is one of order or con- 
fusion, among elements which in themselves are 
neither good nor bad. 

This conception of virtue we find expressed in 
many forms, but always with the same underlying 
idea. A favourite watchword with the Greeks is 
the “middle” or “mean,” the exact point of right- 
ness between two extremes. ‘Nothing in excess,” | 
was a motto inscribed over the temple of Delphi; 
and none could be more characteristic of the ideal 
of these lovers of proportion. Aristotle, indeed, 
has made it the basis of his whole theory of ethics. 
In his conception, virtue is the mean, vice the excess 
lying on either side—courage, for example, the 
mean between foolhardiness and cowardice, tem- 


1 Plato, Rep. 444.—Translated by Davies and Vaughan. 


148 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


perance, between incontinence and _insensibility, 
generosity, between extravagance and meanness. 
The various phases of feeling and the various kinds 
of action he analyzes minutely on this principle, 
understanding always by “the mean” that which 
adapts itself in the due proportion to the circum- 
stances and requirements of every case. 

The interest of this view for us lies in its assump- 
tion that it is not passions or desires in themselves 
that must be regarded as bad, but only their dis- 
proportional. or misdirected indulgence. Let us 
take, for example, the case of the pleasures of sense. 
The puritan’s rule is to abjure them altogether; to 
him they are absolutely wrong in themselves, apart 
from all considerations of time and place. Aristotle, 
on the contrary, enjoins not renunciation but tem- 
perance; and defines the temperate man as one who 
“holds a mean position in respect of pleasures. 
He takes no pleasure in the things in which the 
licentious man takes most pleasure; he rather dis- 
likes them; nor does he take pleasure at all in 
wrong things, nor an excessive pleasure in any- 
thing that is pleasant, nor is he pained at the absence 
of such things, nor does he desire them, except 
perhaps in moderation, nor does he desire them more 
than is right, or at the wrong time, and so on. 
But he will be eager in a moderate and right spirit 
for all such things as are pleasant and at the same 
time conducive to health or to a sound bodily 
condition, and for all other pleasures, so long as 
. they are not prejudicial to these or inconsistent with 
noble conduct or extravagant beyond his means. 


GREEK ETHICS 149 


For unless a person limits himself in this way, he 
affects such pleasures more than is right, whereas 
the temperate man follows the guidance of right 
reason.” + 

As another illustration of this point of view, we 
may take the case of anger. The Christian rule 
is never to resent an injury, but rather, in the 
New Testament phrase, to “turn the other cheek.’ 
Aristotle, while blaming the man who is unduly 
passionate, blames equally the man who is in- 
sensitive; the thing to aim at is to be angry “on 
the proper occasions and with the proper people 
in the proper manner and for the proper length of | 
time.”’ And in this and all other cases the definition 
of what is proper must be left to the determination 
of ‘the sensible man.” 

Thus, in place of a series of hard and fast rules, 
a rigid and uncompromising distinction of acts and 
affections into good and bad, the former to be 
absolutely chosen and the latter absolutely eschewed, 
Aristotle presents us with the general type of a 
subtle and shifting problem, the solution of which 
must be worked out afresh by each individual in 
each particular case. Conduct to him is a free and 
living creature, and not a machine controlled by 
fixed laws. Every life is a work of art shaped by 
the man who lives it; according to the faculty of 
the artist will be the quality of his work, and no 
general rules can supply the place of his own direct 


1 Arist. Ethics. III. 14.—1119 a 11.—Translated by 
Welldon. 


150 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


perception at every turn. The Good is the right 
proportion, the right manner and occasion; the Bad 
is all that varies from this “right.” But the ele- 
ments of human nature in themselves are neither 
good nor bad; they are merely the raw material 
out of which the one or the other may be shaped. 

The idea thus formulated by Aristotle is typically 
Greek. In another form it is the basis of the 
ethical philosophy of Plato, who habitually regards 
virtue as a kind of “order.” ‘The virtue of each 
thing,” he says, “whether body or soul, instrument 
or creature, when given to them in the best way 
comes to them not by chance, but as the result of 
the order and truth and art which are imparted to 
them.” + And the conception here indicated is 
worked out in detail in his Republic. There, after 
distinguishing in the soul three principles or powers, 
reason, passion, and desire, he defines justice as the 
maintenance among them of their proper mutual 
relation, each moving in its own place and doing 
its appropriate work as is, or should be, the case 
with the different classes in a state. 

“The just man will not permit the several princi- 
ples within him to do any work but their own, nor 
allow the distinct classes in his soul to interfere 
with each other, but will really set his house in 
order; and having gained the mastery over himself, 
will so regulate his own character as to be on good 
terms with himself, and to set those three princi- 
ples in tune together, as if they were verily three 


1 Plato, Gorgias, 506 d.—Translated by Jowett. 


GREEK ETHICS 151 


cords of a harmony, a higher and a lower and a 
middle, and whatever may lie between these; and 
after he has bound all these together, and reduced 
the many elements of his nature to a real unity, 
as a temperate and duly harmonized man, he will 
then at length proceed to do whatever he may have 
to do.” 1 

Plato, it is true, in other parts of his work, 
approaches more closely to the dualistic conception 
of an absolute opposition between good and bad 
principles in man. Yet even so, he never altogether 
abandons that esthetic point of view which looks 
to the establishment of order among the conflict- 
ing principles rather than to the annihilation of one 
by the other in an internecine conflict. The point 
may be illustrated by the following passage, where 
the two horses represent respectively the elements 
of fleshly desire and spiritual passion, while the 
charioteer stands for the controlling reason; and 
where, it will be noticed, the ultimate harmony is 
achieved, not by the complete eradication of desire, 
but by its due subordination to the higher principle. 
Even Plato the most ascetic of the Greeks, is a 
Greek first and an ascetic afterwards. 

“Of the nature of the soul, though her true form 
be ever a theme of large and more than mortal 
discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure, 
and let the figure be composite—a pair of winged 
horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses 


1 Plato, Rep. IV. 443.—Translation by Davies and 
Vaughan, 


152 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


and the charioteers of the gods are all of them 
noble and of noble descent, but those of other races 
are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a 
pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, 
and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and 
the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal 
of trouble to him. ... The right-hand horse is 
upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty neck and 
an aquiline nose; his colour is white, and his eyes 
dark; he is a lover of honour and modesty and 
temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs 
no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and 
admonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering 
animal, put together anyhow; he has a short thick 
neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark colour, with 
grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of 
insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly 
yielding to whip and spur. Now when the 
charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his 
whole soul warmed through sense, and is full of the 
pricklings and ticklings of desire, the obedient 
steed, then as always under the government of 
shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved; but the 
other, heedless of the blows of the whip, plunges 
and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his 
companion and the charioteer, whom he forces to 
approach the beloved and to remember the joys 
of love. They at first indignantly oppose him and 
will not be urged on to do terrible and unlawful 
deeds; but at last, when he persists in plaguing 
them, they yield and agree to do as he bids them. 


GREEK ETHICS 153 


And now they are at the spot and behold the flash- 
ing beauty of the beloved; which when the charioteer 
sees, his memory is carried to the true beauty whom 
he beholds in company with Modesty like an image 
placed upon a holy pedestal. He sees her, but he 
is afraid and falls backwards in adoration, and by 
his fall is compelled to pull back the reins with such 
violence as to bring both the steeds on their 
haunches, the one willing and unresisting, the un- 
ruly one very unwilling; and when they have gone 
back a little, the one is overcome with shame and 
wonder, and his whole soul is bathed in perspiration; 
the other, when the pain is over which the bridle 
and the fall had given him, having with difficulty 
taken breath, is full of wrath and reproaches, which 
he heaps upon the charioteer and his fellow-steed, 
for want of courage and manhood, declaring that 
they have been false to their agreement and guilty 
of desertion. Again they refuse, and again he urges 
them on, and will scarce yield to their prayer that 
he would wait until another time. When the 
appointed hour comes, they make as if they had 
forgotten, and he reminds them, fighting and neigh- 
ing and dragging them on, until at length he on 
the same thoughts intent, forces them to draw near 
again. And when they are near he stoops his head 
and puts up his tail, and takes the bit in his teeth 
and pulls shamelessly. Then the charioteer is 
worse off than ever; he falls back like a racer at 
the barrier, and with a still more violent wrench 
drags the bit out of the teeth of the wild steed and 


154 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


covers his abusive jaws and tongue with blood, and 
forces his legs and haunches to the ground and 
punishes him sorely. 

“And when this has happened several times, and 
the villain has ceased from his wanton way, he is 
tamed and humbled, and follows the will of the 
charioteer, and when he sees the beautiful one he 
is ready to die of fear. And from that time forward 
the soul of the lover follows the beloved in modesty 
and holy fear.’ } 

Even from this passage, in spite of its dualistic 
hypothesis, but far more clearly from the whole 
tenor of his work, we may perceive that Plato’s 
description of virtue as an “‘order” of the soul is 
prompted by the same conception, characteristically 
Greek, as Aristotle’s account of virtue as a “mean.” 
The view, as we said at the beginning, is properly 


, esthetic rather than moral. It regards life less 
~ as a battle between two contending principles, in 


———— 


which victory means the annihilation of the one, 
the altogether bad, by the other, the altogether 
good, than as the maintenance of a balance be- 
tween elements neutral in themselves but capable, 
according as their relations are rightly ordered or 
the reverse, of producing either that harmony which 
is called virtue, or that discord which is called vice. 

Such being the conception of virtue character- 
istic of the Greeks, it follows that the motive to 
pursue it can hardly have presented itself to them 
in the form of what we call the “sense of duty.” 


* Plato, Phaedrus. 246.—Translated by Jowett. 


THE GREEK VIEW OF PLEASURE 155 


For duty emphasizes self-repression. Against the 
desires of man it sets a law of prohibition, a law 
which is not conceived as that of his own com- 
plete nature, asserting against a partial or dispro- 
portioned development the balance and totality of 
the ideal, but rather as a rule imposed from with- 
out by a power distinct from himself, for the morti- 
fication, not the perfecting, of his natural impulses 
and aims. Duty emphasizes self-repression; the! 
Greek view emphasized self-development. That; 
“health and beauty and good habit of the soul,’’ 
which is Plato’s ideal, is as much its own recom-| 
mendation to the natural man as is the health and | 
beauty of the body. Vice, on this view, is con- 
demned because it is a frustration of nature, virtue 
praised because it is her fulfilment; and the motive 
throughout is simply that passion to realize one- 
self which is commonly acknowledged as sufficient 
in the case of physical development and which 
appeared sufficient to the Greeks in the case of the 
development of the soul. 


§ 6. THE GREEK VIEW OF PLEASURE 


From all this it follows clearly enough that the 
Greek ideal was far removed from asceticism; but 
it might perhaps be supposed, on the other hand, 
that it came dangerously near to license. Nothing, 
however, could be farther from the case. That 
there were libertines among the Greeks, as every- 
where else, goes without saying; but the con- 
ception that the Greek rule of life was to follow 


156 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


impulse and abandon restraint is a figment of 
would-be “Hellenists” of our own time. The word 
which best sums up the ideal of the Greeks is 
“temperance”; “the mean,” “order,” “harmony,” 
as we Saw, are its characteristic expressions; and 
the self-realization to which they aspired was not 
an anarchy of passion, but an ordered evolution of 
the natural faculties under the strict control of 
a balanced mind. The point may be illustrated by 
a reference to the treatment of pleasure in the 
philosophy of Plato and of Aristotle. 

The practice of the libertine is to identify 
pleasure and good in such a manner that he pursues 
at any moment any pleasure that presents itself, 
eschewing comparison and reflection, with all that 
might tend to check that continuous flow of vivid 
and fresh sensations which he postulates as the 
end of life. The ideal of the Greeks, on the 
contrary, aS interpreted by their two greatest 
thinkers, while on the one hand it is so far opposed 
to asceticism that it requires pleasure as an essential 
complement of Good, on the other, is so far from 
identifying the two, that it recognizes an ordered 
scale of pleasures, and while rejecting altogether 
those at the lower end, admits the rest, not as in 
themselves constituting the Good, but rather as 
harmless additions, or at most as necessary ac- 
companiments of its operation. Plato, in the Re- 
public, distinguishes between the necessary and 
unnecessary pleasures, defining the former as those 
derived from the gratification of appetites “which 
we cannot get rid of, and whose satisfaction does 


THE GREEK VIEW OF PLEASURE § 157 


us good’’—such, for example, as the appetite for 
wholesome food; and the latter as those which be- 
tong to appetites “which we can put away from us 
by early training; and the presence of which, be- 
sides, never does us any good, and in some cases 
does positive harm’—such, for example, as the 
appetite for delicate and luxurious dishes.1| The 
former he would admit, the latter he excludes from 
his ideal of happiness. And though in a later 
dialogue, the Philebus, he goes farther than this, 
and would exclude from the perfect life all pleasures 
except those which he describes as “pure,” that is 
those which attend upon the contemplation of form 
and colour and sound, or which accompany in- 
tellectual activity; yet here, no doubt, he is pass- 
ing beyond the sphere of the practicable ideal, and 
his distinct personal bias towards asceticism must 
be discounted if we are to take him as representative 
of the Greek view. His general contention, how- 
ever, that pleasures must be ranked as higher and 
as lower, and that at the best they are not to be 
identified with the Good, is fully accepted by so 
typical a Greek as Aristotle. Aristotle, however, 
is careful not to condemn any pleasure that is not 
definitely harmful. Even “unnecessary” pleasures, 
he admits, may be desirable in themselves; even 
the deliberate creation of desire with a view to the 
enjoyment of satisfying it may be admissible if it 
is not injurious. Still, there are kinds of pleasures 


1Plato, Rep. VIII. 558.—Translated by Davies and 
Vaughan. 


158 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


which ought not to be pursued, and occasions and 
methods of seeking it which are improper and per- 
verse. Therefore the Reason must be always at 
hand to check and to control; and the ultimate test 
of true worth in pleasure, as in everything else, is 
the trained judgment of the good and sensible man. 


§ 7. ILLUSTRATIONS—ISCHOMACHUS; SOCRATES 


Such, then, was the character of the Greek con- 
ception of excellence. The account we have given 
may seem somewhat abstract and ideal; but it gives 
the general, formula of the life which every culti- 
vated Greek would at any rate have wished to live. 
And in confirmation of this point we may adduce 
the testimony of Xenophon, who has left us a de- 
scription, evidently drawn from life, of what he 
conceives to be the perfect type of a ‘‘gentleman.” 

The interest of the account lies in the fact, that 
Xenophon himself was clearly an ‘‘average” Greek, 
one, that is to say, of good natural parts, of per- 
fectly normal faculties and tastes, undisturbed by 
any originality of character or mind, and repre- 
senting, therefore, as we may fairly assert, the 
ordinary views and aims of an upright and com- 
petent man of the world. His description of the 
“gentleman,” therefore, may be taken as a repre- 
sentative account of the recognized ideal of all that 
class of Athenian citizens. And this is how the 
gentleman in question, Ischomachus, describes his 
course of life. 

“In the first place,” he says, “I worship the gods. 


ILLUSTRATIONS 159 


Next, I endeavour to the best of my ability, assisted 
by prayer, to get health and strength of body, 
reputation in the city, good will among my friends, 
honourable security in battle, and an honourable 
increase of fortune.” 

At this point Socrates, who is supposed to be the 
interlocutor, interrupts. “Do you really covet 
wealth,” he asks, “with all the trouble it involves?” 
“Certainly I do,” is the reply, “for it enables me 
to honour the gods magnificently, to help my friends 
if they are in want, and to contribute to the re- 
sources of my country.” 

Here definitely and precisely expressed is the 
ideal of the Athenian gentleman—the beautiful body 
housing the beautiful soul, the external aids of 
fortune, friends, and the like, and the realization of 
the individual self in public activity. Upon it 
follows an account of the way in which Ischomachus 
was accustomed to pass his days. He rises early, 
he tells us, to catch his friends before they go out, 
or walks to the city to transact his necessary busi- 
ness. If he is not called into town, he pays a visit 
to his farm, walking for the sake of exercise and 
sending on his horse. On his arrival he gives 
directions about the sowing, ploughing, or what- 
ever it may be, and then mounting his horse practises 
his military exercises. Finally, he returns home on 
foot, running part of the way, takes his bath, and 
sits down to a moderate midday meal. 

This combination of physical exercise, military 
training and business, arouses the enthusiasm of 
Socrates. ‘How right you are!” he cries, ‘and the 


160 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


consequence is that you are as healthy and strong 
as we see you, and one of the best riders and the 
wealthiest men in the country!” 

This little prosaic account of the daily life of an 
Athenian gentleman is completely in harmony with 
all we have said about the character of the Greek 
ideal; but it comprehends only a part, and that the 
least spiritual, of that rich and many-sided ex- 
cellence. It may be as well, therefore, to append 
by way of complement the description of another 
personality, exceptional indeed even among the 
Greeks, yet one which only Greece could have pro- 
duced—the personality of Socrates. No more 
striking figure is presented to us in history, none has 
been more vividly portrayed, and none, in spite of 
the originality of mind which provoked the hostility 
of the crowd, is more thoroughly Hellenic in every 
aspect, physical, intellectual, and moral. 

That Socrates was ugly in countenance was a 
defect which a Greek could not fail to note, and his 
snub nose and big belly are matters of frequent and 
jocose allusion. But apart from these defects his 
physique, it appears, was exceptionally good; he 
was sedulous in his attendance at the gymnasia, and 
was noted for his powers of endurance and his 
courage and skill in war. Plato records it of him 
that in a hard winter on campaign, when the 
common soldiers were muffling themselves in sheep- 
skins and felt against the cold, he alone went about 
in his ordinary cloak, and barefoot over the ice 
and snow; and he further describes his bearing in 
a retreat from a lost battle, how “there you might 


ILLUSTRATIONS 161 


see him, just as he is in the streets of Athens, stalk- 
ing like a pelican and rolling his eyes, calmly con- 
templating enemies as well as friends, and making 
very intelligible to anybody, even from a distance, 
that whoever attacked him would be likely to meet 
with a stout resistance.” } 

To this efficiency of body corresponded, in accord- 


ance with the Greek ideal, a perfect balance and | 


harmony of soul. Plato, in a fine figure, compares 
him to the wooden statues of Silenus, which con- 
cealed behind a grotesque exterior beautiful golden 
images of the gods. Of these divine forms none 
was fairer in Socrates than that typical Greek 
virtue, temperance. Without a touch of asceticism, 
he knew how to be contented with a little. His 
diet he measured strictly with a view to health. 
Naturally abstemious, he could drink, when he 
chose, more than another man; but no one had 
ever seen him drunk. His affections were strong 
and deep, but never led him away to seek his own 
gratification at the cost of those he loved. With- 
out cutting himself off from any of the pleasures 
of life, a social man and a frequent guest at feasts, 
he preserved without an effort the supremacy of 
character and mind over the flesh he neither starved 
nor pampered. Here is a description by Plato of 
his bearing at the close of an all-night carouse, 
which may stand as a concrete illustration not only 
of the character of Socrates, but of the meaning of 
“temperance” as it was understood by the Greeks: 


1 Plato, Symp. 221 b.—Translated by Jowett. 


z 
3 
td 


\ 


162 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


“Aristodemus said that Eryximachus, Phedrus, 
and others went away—he himself fell asleep, and 
as the nights were long took a good rest: he was 
awakened towards daybreak by a crowing of cocks, 
and when he awoke the others were either asleep, 
or had gone away; there remained awake only 
Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon, who were 
drinking out of a large goblet which they passed 
round, and Socrates was discoursing to them. 
Aristodemus did not hear the beginning of the dis- 
course, and he was only half awake, but the chief 
thing which he remembered was Socrates compell- 
ing the other two to acknowledge that the genius 
of comedy was the same as that of tragedy, and 
that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in 
comedy also. To this they assented, being drowsy, 
and not quite following the argument. And first 
of all Aristophanes dropped off, then, when the day 
was already dawning, Agathon. Socrates, when he 
had laid them to sleep, rose to depart; Aristodemus, 
as his manner was, following him. At the Lyceum 
he took a bath, and passed the day as usual. In 
the evening he retired to rest at his own house.” * 

With this quality of temperance was combined in 
Socrates a rare measure of independence and moral 
courage. He was never an active politician; but 
as every Athenian citizen was called, at some time 
or another, to public office, he found himself, on 
a critical occasion, responsible for putting a cer- 
tain proposition to the vote in the Assembly. It 


1 Plato, Symposion, 223.—Translated by Jowett. 


ILLUSTRATIONS 163 


was a moment of intense excitement. A great 
victory had just been won; but the generals who 
had achieved the success had neglected to recover 
the corpses of the dead or save the shipwrecked. 
It was proposed to take a vote of life or death 
on all the generals collectively. Socrates, as it 
happened, was one of the committee whose duty 
it was to put the question to the Assembly. But 
the proposition was in itself illegal, and Socrates, 
with some other members of the committee, refused 
to submit it to the vote. Every kind of pressure 
was brought to bear upon the recalcitrant officers; 
orators threatened, friends besought, the mob 
clamoured and denounced. Finally, all but Socrates 
gave way. He alone, an old man, in office for the 
first time, had the courage to obey his conscience 
and the law in face of an angry populace crying 
for blood. 

And as he could stand against a mob, so he could 
stand against a despot. At the time when Athens 
was ruled by the thirty tyrants he was ordered, 
with four others, to arrest a man whom the author- 
ities wished to put out of the way. The man was 
guilty of no crime, and Socrates refused. “I went 
quietly home,” he says, ‘‘and no doubt I should have 
been put to death for it, if the government had not 
shortly after come to an end.” 

These, however, were exceptional episodes in the 
career of a man who was never a prominent 
politician. The main interest of Socrates was in- 
tellectual and moral; an interest, however, rather 
practical than speculative. For though he was 


164 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


charged in his indictment with preaching atheism, 
he appears in fact to have concerned himself little 
or nothing with either theological or physical in- 
quiries. He was careful in his observance of all 
prescribed religious rites, and probably accepted the 
gods as powers of the natural world and authors 
of human institutions and laws. His originality 
lay not in any purely speculative views, but in the 
pertinacious curiosity, practical in its origin and 
aim, with which he attacked and sifted the ethical 
conceptions of his time: ‘‘What is justice?” “What 
is piety?” ‘What is temperance?”—these were the 
kinds of questions he never tired of raising, point- 
ing out contradictions and inconsistencies in current 
ideas, and awakening doubts which if negative in 
form were positive and fruitful in effect. 

His method in pursuing these inquiries was that 
of cross-examination. In the streets, in the market, 
in the gymnasia, at meetings grave and gay, in 
season or out of season, he raised his points of 
definition. The city was in a ferment around him. 
Young men and boys followed and hung on his 
lips wherever he went. By the charm of his per- 
sonality, his gracious courtesy and wit, and the 
large and generous atmosphere of a sympathy 
always at hand to temper to particular persons the 
rigours of a generalizing logic, he drew to himself, 
with a fascination not more of the intellect than of 
the heart, all that was best and brightest in the 
youth of Athens. His relation to his young dis- 
ciples was that of a lover and a friend; and the 
stimulus given by his dialectics to their keen and 


ILLUSTRATIONS 165 


eager minds was supplemented and reinforced by 
the appeal to their admiration and love of his sweet 
and virile personality. 

Only in Ancient Athens, perhaps, could such a 
character and such conditions have met. The 
sociable outdoor city life; the meeting places in the 
open air, and especially the gymnasia, frequented 
by young and old not more for exercise of the body 
than for recreation of the mind, the nimble and 
versatile Athenian wits trained to preternatural 
acuteness by the debates of the law courts and the 
Assembly; all this was exactly the environment 
fitted to develop and sustain a genius at once so 
subtle and so humane as that of Socrates. It is 
the concrete presentation of this city-life that lends 
so peculiar a charm to the dialogues of Plato. The 
spirit of metaphysics puts on the human form; and 
Dialectic walks the streets and contends in the 
palestra. It would be impossible to convey by 
Citation the cumulative effect of this constant refer- 
ence in Plato to a human background; but a single 
excerpt may perhaps-help us to realize the condi- 
tions under which Socrates lived and worked. Here, 
then, is a description of the scene in one of those 
gymnasia in which he was wont to hold his con- 
versations: 

“Upon entering we found that the boys had just 
been sacrificing; and this part of the festival was 
nearly at an end. They were all in white array, 
and games at dice were going on among them. 
Most of them were in the outer court amusing them- 
selves; but some were in a corner of the Apody- 


166 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


terium playing at odd and even with a number of 
dice, which they took out of little wicker baskets. 
There was also a circle of lookers-on, one of whom 
was Lysis. He was standing among the other boys 
and youths, having a crown upon his head, like a 
fair vision, and not less worthy of praise for his 
goodness than for his beauty. We left them, and 
went over to the opposite side of the room, where, 
finding a quiet place, we sat down; and then we 
began to talk. This attracted Lysis, who was con- 
stantly turning round to look at us—he was evi- 
dently wanting to come to us. For a time he 
hesitated and had not the courage to come alone; 
but first of all, his friend Menexenus came in out 
of the court in the interval of his play, and when 
he saw Ctesippus and myself, came and sat by us; 
aud then Lysis, seeing him, followed, and sat down 
with him, and the other boys joined. 

“TI turned to Menexenus, and said: ‘Son of 
Demophon, which of you two youths is the elder?’ 

“*That is a matter of dispute between us,’ he 
said. 

‘And which is the nobler? Is that a matter of 
dispute too?’ 

“Yes, certainly.’ 

‘And another disputed point is, which is the 
fairer?’ 

“The two boys laughed. 

‘““*T shall not ask which is the richer,’ I said: ‘for 
you two are friends, are you not?’ 

“ ‘Certainly,’ they replied. 

“ ‘And friends have all things in common, so that 


ILLUSTRATIONS 167 


one of you can be no richer than the other, if you 
say truly that you are friends.’ 

“They assented. I was about to ask which was 
the greater of the two, and which was the wiser 
of the two; but at this moment Menexenus was 
called away by some one who came and said that the 
gymnastic-master wanted him. I supposed that 
he had to offer sacrifice. So he went away and I 
asked Lysis some more questions.” * 

Such were the scenes in which Socrates passed 
his life. Of his influence it is hardly necessary here 
to speak at length. In the well-known metaphor 
put into his mouth by Plato, he was the “gad-fly” of 
the Athenian people. To prick intellectual lethargy, 
to force people to think, and especially to think 
about the conceptions with which they supposed 
themselves to be most familiar, those which guided 
their conduct in private and public affairs—yjustice, 
expediency, honesty, and the like—such was the 
constant object of his life. That he should have 
made enemies, that he should have been misunder- 
stood, that he should have been accused of under- 
mining the foundations of morality and religion, is 
natural and intelligible enough; and it was on these 
grounds that he was condemned to death. His 
conduct at his trial was of a piece with the rest 
of his life. The customary arts of the pleader, the 
appeal to the sympathies of the public, the intro- 
duction into court of weeping wife and children, 
he rejected as unworthy of himself and of his cause. 


1 Plato, Lysis 206 e.—Translated by Jowett. 


168 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


His defence was a simple exposition of the character 
and the aims of his life; so far from being a 
criminal he asserted that he was a benefactor of 
the Athenian people; and having, after his con- 
demnation, to suggest the sentence he thought 
appropriate, he proposed that he should be sup- 
ported at the public expense as one who had de- 
served well of his country. After his sentence to 
death, having to wait thirty days for its execution, 
he showed no change from his customary cheer- 
fulness, passing his time in conversation with his 
friends. So far from regretting his fate he rather 
congratulated himself that he would escape the 
decadence that attends upon old age; and he had, 
if we may trust Plato, a fair and confident assur- 
ance that a happy life awaited him beyond. He 
died, according to the merciful law of Athens, by 
drinking hemlock; “the wisest and justest and best,” 
in Plato’s judgment, “of all the men that I have 
ever known.” 

We have dwelt thus long on the personality of 
Socrates, familiar though it be, not only on account 
of its intrinsic interest, but also because it is pe- 
culiarly Hellenic. That sunny and frank intelli- 
gence, bathed, as it were, in the open air, a gracious 
blossom springing from the root of physical health, 
that unique and perfect balance of body and soul, 
passion and intellect, represent, against the brilliant — 
setting of Athenian life, the highest achievement — 
of the civilization of Greece. The figure of Soc- 
rates, no doubt, has been idealized by Plato, but it 
is none the less significant of the trend of Hellenic 


THE GREEK VIEW OF WOMAN _ 169 


life. No other people could have conceived such 
an ideal; no other could have gone so far towards 
its realization. 


§ 8. THe GREEK VIEW OF WoMAN 


In the preceding account we have attempted to 
give some conception of the Greek ideal for the 
individual man. It is now time to remind our- 
selves that that ideal was only supposed to be 
proper to a small class—the class of soldier- 
citizens. Artisans and slaves, as we have seen, 
had no participation in it; neither, and that is our 
next point, had women. 

Nothing more profoundly distinguishes the Hel- 
lenic from the modern view of life than the esti- 
mate in which women were held by the Greeks. 
Their opinion on this point was partly the cause 
and partly the effect of that preponderance of the 
idea of the state on which we have already dwelt, 
and from which it followed naturally enough that 
marriage should be regarded primarily as a means 
of producing healthy and efficient citizens. This 
view is best illustrated by the institutions of such 
a state as Sparta, where, as we saw, the woman was 
specially trained for maternity, and connections 
outside the marriage tie were sanctioned by custom 
and opinion, if they were such as were likely to 
lead to healthy offspring. Further it may be noted 
that in almost every state the exposure of deformed 
or,sickly infants was encouraged by law, the child 
being thus regarded, from the beginning, as a mem- 


170 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


ber of the state, rather than as a member of the 
family. 

The same view is reflected in the speculations of 
political philosophers. Plato, indeed, in his Re- 
public, goes so far as to eliminate the family re- 
lation altogether. Not only is the whole connection 
between men and women to be regulated by the 
state, in respect both of the persons and of the 
limit of age within which they may associate, but 
the children as soon as they are born are to be 
carried off to a common nursery, there to be reared 
together, undistinguished by the mothers, who will 
suckle indifferently any infant that might happen 
to be assigned to them for the purpose. Here, as 
in other instances, Plato goes far beyond the limits 
set by the current sentiment of the Greeks, and 
in his later work is reluctantly constrained to 
abandon his scheme of community of wives and 
children. Yet even there he makes it compulsory 
on every man to marry between the ages of thirty 
and thirty-five, under penalty of fine and civil dis- 
abilities. Plato, no doubt, as we have said, ex- 
aggerates the opinions of his time; but the view, 
which he pushes to its extreme, of the subordination 
of the family to the state, was one, as we have 
already pointed out, which did predominate in 
Greece. It reappears in a soberer form in the 
treatise of Aristotle. He too would regulate by 
law both the age at which marriages should take 
place and the number of children that should be 
produced, and would have all deformed infants 
exposed. And here, no doubt, he is speaking in 


THE GREEK VIEW OF WOMAN _ 171 


conformity if not with the practice, at least with 
the feeling of Greece. The modern conception 
that the marriage relation is a matter of private 
concern, and that any individual has a right to wed 
whom and when he will, and to produce children 
at his own discretion, regardless of all consider- 
ations of health and decency, was one altogether 
alien to the Greeks. In theory at least, and to 
some extent in practice (as for example in the case 
of Sparta), they recognized that the production 
of children was a business of supreme import to 
the state, and that it was right and proper that it 
should be regulated by law with a view to the 
advantage of the whole community. 


And if now we turn from considering the family 
in its relation to the state to regard it in its re- 
lation to the individual, we are struck once more 
by a divergence from the modern point of view, 
or rather from the view which is supposed to pre- 
vail, particularly by writers of fiction, at any rate 
in modern English life. In ancient Greece, so far 
as our knowledge goes, there was little or no ro- 
mance connected with the marriage tie. Marriage 
was a means of producing legitimate children; that 
is how it is defined by Demosthenes; and we have 
no evidence that it was ever regarded as anything 
more. In Athens we know that marriages were 
commonly arranged by the father, much as they 
are in modern France, on grounds of age, property, 
connection and the like, and without any regard 
for the inclination of the parties concerned. And 


172 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


an interesting passage in Xenophon indicates a 
point of view quite consonant with this accepted 
practice. God, he says, ordained the institution 
of marriage; but on what grounds? Not in the least 
for the sake of the personal relation that might 
be established between the husband and wife, but 
for ends quite external and indifferent to any 
affection that might exist between them. First, for 
the perpetuation of the human race; secondly, to 
raise up protectors for the father in his old age; 
thirdly, to secure an appropriate division of labour, 
the man performing the outdoor work, the women 
guarding and superintending at home, and each thus 
fulfilling duly the function for which they were de- 
signed by nature. This eminently prosaic way of 
conceiving the marriage relation is also, it would 
seem, eminently Greek; and it leads us to consider 
more particularly the opinion prevalent in Greece 
of the nature and duty of women in general. 

Here the first point to be noticed is the wide 
difference of the view represented in the Homeric 
poems from that which meets us in the historic 
period. Readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey will 
find depicted there, amid all the barbarity of an 
age of rapine and war, relations between men and 
women so tender, faithful and beautiful, that they 
may almost stand as universal types of the ultimate 
human ideal. Such for example is the relation 
between Odysseus and Penelope, the wife waiting 
year by year for the husband whose fate is un- 
known, wooed in vain by suitors who waste her 
substance and wear her life, nightly ‘watering her 


THE GREEK VIEW OF WOMAN © 173 


bed with her tears” for twenty weary years, till 
at last the wanderer returns, and “at once her knees 
were loosened and her heart melted within her .. . 
and she fell a weeping and ran straight towards him, 
and cast her hands about his neck, and kissed his 
head;” for “even as the sight of the land is welcome 
to mariners, so welcome to her was the sight of her 
lord, and her white arms would never quite leave 
hold of his neck.” 4 

Such, again, is the relation between Hector and 
Andromache as described in the well-known scene 
of the Iliad, where the wife comes out with her 
babe to take leave of the husband on his way to 
battle. “It were better for me,” she cries, “to go 
down to the grave if I lose thee; for never will any 
comfort be mine when once thou, even thou, hast 
met thy fate, but only sorrow. ... Thou art to 
me father and lady mother, yea, and brother, even 
as thou art my goodly husband. Come now, have 
pity and abide here upon the tower, lest thou make 
thy child an orphan and thy wife a widow.” Hector 
answers with the plea of honour. He cannot draw 
back, but he foresees defeat; and in his anticipation 
of the future nothing is so bitter as the fate he fears 
for his wife. “Yet doth the conquest of the 
Trojans hereafter not so much trouble me, neither 
Hekabe’s own, neither King Priam’s, neither my 
brethren’s, the many and brave that shall fall in 
the dust before their foemen, as doth thine anguish 
in the day when some mail-clad Achaian shall lead 


1 Odyss. XXIII. 205, 231.—Translated hy Bytcher and 
Lang. 


174 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


thee weeping and rob thee of the light of freedom. 
. . . But me in death may the heaped-up earth be 
covering, ere I hear thy crying and thy carrying 
into captivity.” } 

But most striking of all the portraits of women 
to be found in Homer, and most typical of a frank 
and healthy relation between the sexes, is the 
account of Nausicaa given in the Odyssey. Ulysses, 
shipwrecked and naked, battered and covered with 
brine, surprises Nausicaa and her maidens as they 
are playing at ball on the shore. The attendants 
run away, but Nausicaa remains to hear what the 
stranger has to say. He asks her for shelter and 
clothing; and she grants the request, with an ex- 
quisite courtesy and a freedom from all embarrass- 
ment which becomes only the more marked and the 
more delightful when, as she sees him emerge from 
the bath, clothed and beautiful, she cannot restrain 
the exclamation “would that such a one might be 
called my husband, dwelling here, and that it may 
please him here to abide.” * About the whole scene 
there is a freshness and a fragrance as of early 
morning, and a tone so natural, free and frank, 
that in the face of this rustic idyl the later centuries 
sicken and faint, like candle-light in the splendour 
of the dawn. 

If we had only Homer to give us our ideas of 
the Greeks, we might conclude, from such passages 
as these, that they had a conception of woman 
and of her relation to man, finer and nobler in some 


* Yliad VI. 450.—Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers, 
2 Od. VI. 244.—Translated by Butcher and Lang. 


THE GREEK VIEW OF WOMAN 175 


respects, than that of modern times. But in fact 
the Homeric poems represent a civilization which 
had passed away before the opening of the period 
with which at present we are chiefly concerned. 
And in the interval, for reasons which we need not 
here attempt to state, a change had taken place 
in the whole way of regarding the female sex. 
So far, at any rate, as our authorities enable us to 
judge, woman in the historic age was conceived 
to be so inferior to man that he recognized in her 
no other end than to minister to his pleasure or to 
become the mother of his children. Romance and 
the higher championship of intellect and spirit do 
not appear (with certain notable exceptions) to 
have been commonly sought or found in this rela- 
tion. Woman, in fact, was regarded as a means, 
- not as an end; and was treated in a manner conso- 
nant with this view. Of this estimate many illustra- 
tions might be adduced from the writers of the fifth 
and fourth centuries. Plato, for example, classes 
together ‘“‘children, women, and servants,’ + and 
states generally that there is no branch of human in- 
dustry in which the female sex is not inferior to 
the male.” Similarly, Aristotle insists again and 
again on the natural inferiority of woman, and 
illustrates it by such quaint observations as the 
following: “A man would be considered a coward 
who was only as brave as a brave woman, and a 
woman as a chatterbox who was only as modest as 
a good man.” ? But the most striking example, 


1 Plato, Republic 431 c. * Ibid. 455 c. 
* Arist. Pol. III. 1277 b 21.—Translated by Welldon. 


176 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


perhaps, because the most unconscious, of this 
habitual way of regarding women is to be found 
in the funeral oration put by Thucydides into the 
mouth of Pericles, where the speaker, after suggest- 
ing what consolation he can to the fathers of the 
slain, turns to the women with the brief but signifi- 
cant exhortation: “If I am to speak of womanly 
virtues to those of you who will henceforth be 
widows, let me sum them up in one short admon- 
ition: To a woman not to show more weakness 
than is natural to her sex is a great glory, and not to 
be talked about for good or for evil among men.” ! 

The sentiments of the poets are less admissible 
as evidence; but some of them are so extreme that 
they may be adduced as a further indication of a 
point of view whose prevalence alone could render 
them even dramatically plausible. Such for ex- 
ample is the remark of one of the characters in 
“‘Menander,” ‘a woman is necessarily an evil, and 
he is a lucky man who catches her in the mildest 
form.” While the general Greek view of the de- 
pendence of woman on man is well expressed in the 
words of Aethra, in the “Suppliants” of Euripides: 
“It is proper for women who are wise to let men 
act for them in everything.” ? | 

In accordance with this conception of the in- 
feriority of the female sex, and partly as a cause, 
partly as an effect of it, we find that the position of 
the wife in ancient Greece was simply that of the 
domestic drudge. To stay at home and mind the 


1 Thucydides II. 45.—Translated by Jowett. 
2 Euripides, Hik. 40. 


THE GREEK VIEW OF WOMAN 177 


house was her recognized ideal. “A free woman 
should be bounded by the street door,” says one of 
the characters in Menander; and another writer dis- 
criminates as follows the functions of the two sexes: 
“War, politics, and public speaking are the sphere 
of man; that of woman is to keep house, to stay 
at home and to receive and tend her husband.” 
We are not surprised, therefore, to find that the 
symbol of woman is the tortoise; and in the follow- 
ing burlesque passage from Aristophanes we shall 
recognize, in spite of the touch of caricature, the 
genuine features of the Greek wife. Praxagora is 
recounting the merits and services of women: 

“They dip their wool in hot water according to 
the ancient plan, all of them without exception, 
and never make the slightest innovation. They sit 
and cook, as of old. They carry upon their heads, 
as of old. They conduct the Themophoriae, as of 
old. They wear out their husbands, as of old. 
They buy sweets, as of old.” 4 

And that this was also the kind of ideal approved 
by their lords and masters, and that any attempt 
to pass beyond it was resented, is amusingly 
illustrated in the following extract from the same 
poet, where Lysistrata explains the growing in- 
dignation of the women at the bad conduct of 
affairs by the men, and the way in which their 
attempts to interfere were resented. The comments 
of the “magistrate” typify, of course, the man’s 
point of view. 


1 Aristophanes, Eccles. 215. 


178 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


“Think of our old moderation and gentleness, think how 
we bore with your pranks, and were still, 

All through the days of your former prognacity, all 
through the war that is over and spent: 

Not that (be sure) we approved of your policy; never our 
griefs you allowed us to vent. 

Well we perceived your mistakes and mismanagement. 
Often at home on our housekeeping cares, 

Often we heard of some foolish proposal you made for 
conducting the public affairs. 

Then would we question you mildly and pleasantly, 
inwardly grieving, but outwardly gay; 

‘Husband, how goes it abroad ?’ we would ask of him; 
what have ye done in Assembly to-day?’ 

‘What would ye write on the side of the Treaty-stone?’ 
Husband says angrily, ‘What’s that to you? 

You hold your tongue!’ And I held it accordingly. 


STRATYLLIS. 
That is a thing which I never would do! 


MAGISTRATE. 


Ma’am, if you hadn’t you’d soon have repented it. 


LYSISTRATA. 


Therefore I held it, and spake not a word. 

Soon of another tremendous absurdity, wilder and worse 
than the former, we heard. 

‘Husband,’ I say, with a tender solicitude, ‘why have you 
passed such a foolish decree ?’ 

Viciously, moodily, glaring askance at me, ‘Stick to your 
spinning, my mistress,’ says he, 

‘Else you will speedily find it the worse for you! war is 
the care and business of men!’ 


THE GREEK VIEW OF WOMAN _ 179 


MAGISTRATE. 
Zeus! ’twas a worthy reply, and an excellent! 


LYSISTRATA. 
What! you unfortunate, shall we not then, 
Then, when we see you perplexed and incompetent, shall 
we not tender advice to the state!” + 


The conception thus indicated in burlesque of 
the proper place of woman is expressed more 
seriously, from the point of view of the average 
man, in the “Oeconomicus” of Xenophon. Ischo- 
machus, the hero of that work, with whom we have 
already made acquaintance, gives an account of his 
own wife, and of the way in which he had trained 
her. When he married her, he explains, she was 
not yet fifteen, and had been brought up with the 
utmost care “that she might see, hear, and ask as 
little as possible.’ Her accomplishments were 
weaving and a sufficient acquaintance with all that 
concerns the stomach; and her attitude towards her 
husband she expressed in the single phrase: 
“Everything rests with you; my duty, my mother 
said, is simply to be modest.”? Ischomachus pro- 
ceeds to explain to her the place he expects her to 
fill; she is to suckle his children, to cook, and to 
superintend the house; and for this purpose God has 
given her special gifts, different from but not 
necessarily inferior to those of man. Husband and 
wife naturally supply one another’s deficiencies;' 
and if the wife perform her function worthily she 


1 Aristoph. Lysistrata. 507.—Translated by B. B. 
Rogers. 


130 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


may even make herself the ruling partner, and be 
sure that as she grows older she will be held not 
less but more in honour, as the guardian of her 
children and the stewardess of her husband’s goods. 
—In Xenophon’s view, in fact, the inferiority of the 
woman almost disappears; and the sentiment ap- 
proximates closely to that of Tennyson— 


“either sex alone 
Is half itself, and in true marriage lies 
Nor equal, nor unequal: each fulfils 
Defect in each.” 


Such a conception, however, of the ‘“comple- 
mentary” relation of woman to man, does not ex- 
clude a conviction of her essential inferiority. And 
this conviction, it can hardly be disputed, was a 
cardinal point in the Greek view of life. 


§ 9. PROTESTS AGAINST THE COMMON VIEW OF 
WoMAN 


Nevertheless, there are not wanting indications, 
both in theory and practice, of a protest against it. 
In Sparta, as we have already noticed, girls, in- 
stead of being confined to the house, were brought 
up in the open air among the boys, trained in gym- 
nastics and accustomed to run and wrestle naked. 
And Plato, modelling his view upon this experience, 
makes no distinction of the sexes in his ideal re- 
public. Women, he admits, are generally inferior 
to men, but they have similar, if lower, capacities 
and powers. There is no occupation or art for 


PROTESTS AGAINST VIEW OF WOMAN 181 


which they may not be fitted by nature and educa- 
tion; and he would therefore have them take their 
share in government and war, as well as in the 
various mechanical trades. “None of the occu- 
pations,” he says, “which comprehend the ordering 
of a state, belong to woman as woman, nor yet to 
man as man; but natural gifts are to be found here 
and there, in both sexes alike; and, so far as her 
nature is concerned, the woman is admissible to all 
pursuits as well as the man; though in all of them 
the woman is weaker than the man.” ? 

In adopting this attitude Plato stands alone not 
only among the Greeks, but one might almost say, 
among mankind, till we come to the latest views 
of the nineteenth century. But there is another 
Greek, the poet Euripides, who, without advancing 
any theory about the proper position of women, 
yet displays so intimate an understanding of their 
difficulties, and so warm and close a sympathy with 
their griefs, that some of his utterances may stand 
to all time as documents of the dumb and age-long 
protest of the weaker against the stronger sex. In 
illustration we may cite the following lines from 
the “Medea,” applicable, mutatis mutandis, to how 
many generations of suffering wives? 

“Of all things that have life and sense we women 
are most wretched. For we are compelled to buy 
with gold a husband who is also—worst of all!—the 
‘master of our person. And on his character, good 
or bad, our whole fate depends, For divorce is 


1Plato, Rep. 455 d—Translated by Davies and 
Vaughan. 


182 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


regarded as a disgrace to a woman and she cannot 
repudiate her husband. Then coming as she does 
into the midst of manners and customs strange to 
her, she would need the gift of divination—unless 
She has been taught at home—to know how best to 
treat her bed-fellow. And if we manage so well 
that our husband remains faithful to us, and does 
not break away, we may think ourselves fortunate; 
if not, there is nothing for it but death. A man 
when he is vexed at home can go out and find relief 
among his friends or acquaintances; but we women 
have none to look to but him. They tell us we live 
a sheltered life at home while they go to the wars; 
but that is nonsense. For I would rather go into 
battle thrice than bear a child once.” 4 

Hitherto we have been speaking mainly of the 
position of the wife in Greece. It is necessary 
now to say a few words about that class of women 
who were called in the Greek tongue Hetere; and 
who are by some supposed to have represented, in- 
tellectually at least, a higher level of culture than 
the other members of their sex. In exceptional 
cases, this, no doubt, was the fact. Aspasia, for 
example, the mistress of Pericles, was famous for 
her powers of mind. According to Plato she was 
an accomplished rhetorician, and the real composer 
of the celebrated funeral oration of Pericles; and 
Plutarch asserts that she was courted and admired 
by the statesmen and philosophers of Greece. But 
Aspasia cannot be taken as a type of the Hetere 
of Greece. That these women, by the variety and 


1 Euripides, Med. 230. 


FRIENDSHIP 183 


freedom of their life, may and must have acquired 
certain qualities: of character and mind that could 
hardly be developed in the seclusion of the Greek 
home, may readily be admitted; we know, for ex- 
ample, that they cultivated music and the power 
of conversation; and were welcome guests at supper- 
parties. But we have no evidence that the re- 
lations which they formed rested as a rule on any 
but the simplest physical basis. The real dis- 
tinction, under this head, between the Greek point 
of view and our own, appears to lie rather in the 
frankness with which this whole class of relations 
was recognized by the Greeks. These were temples 
in honour of Aphrodite Pandemos, the goddess of 
illicit love, and festivals celebrated in her honour; 
statues were erected of famous courtesans, of 
Phryne for example, at Delphi, between two kings; 
and philosophers and statesmen lived with their 
mistresses openly, without any loss of public reputa- 
tion. Every man, said the orator Demosthenes, 
requires besides his wife at least two mistresses; 
and this statement, made as a matter of course in 
open court, is perhaps the most curious illustration 
we possess of the distinction between the Greek 
civilization and our own, as regards not the fact 
itself but the light in which it was viewed. 


§ 10. FRIENDSHIP 


From what has been said about the Greek view 
of women, it might naturally have been supposed 
that there can have been little place in their life for 


184 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


all that we designate under the term “romance.” 
Personal affection, as we have seen, was not the 
basis of married life; and relations with Hetere 
appear to have been, in this respect, no finer or 
higher than similar relations in our own times. 
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to conclude, 
from these conditions, that the element of romance 
was absent from Greek life. The fact is simply that 
with them it took a different form, that of passionate 
friendship between men. Such friendships, of 
course, occur in all nations and at all times, but 
among the Greeks, they were, we might say, an 
institution. Their ideal was the development and 
education of the younger by the older man, and in 
this view they were recognized and approved by 
custom and law as an important factor in the state. 
In Sparta, for example, it was the rule that every 
boy had attached to him some elder youth by 
whom he was constantly attended, admonished, and 
trained, and who shared in public estimation the 
praise and blame of his acts; so that it is even re- 
ported that on one occasion a Spartan boy having 
cried out in a fight, not he himself but his friend 
was fined for the lapse of self-control. The custom 
of Sparta existed also in Crete. But the most re- 
markable instance of the deliberate dedication of 
this passion to political and military ends is that 
of the celebrated ‘“Theban band,” a troop consist- 
ing exclusively of pairs of lovers, who marched and 
fought in battle side by side, and by their presence 
and example inspired one another to a courage so 
constant and high that “‘it is stated that they were 


FRIENDSHIP 185 


never beaten till the battle at Cheronea: and when 
Philip, after the fight, took a view of the slain, 
and came to the place where the three hundred that 
fought his phalanx lay dead together, he wondered, 
and understanding that it was the band of lovers, 
he shed tears, and said, “Perish any man who 
suspects that these men either did or suffered any- 
thing that was base.” } 

Greek legend and history, in fact resounds with 
the praises of friends. Achilles and Patroclus, 
Pylades and Orestes, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, 
Solon and Peisistratus, Socrates and Alcibiades, 
Epaminondas and Pelopidas,—these are names that 
recall at once all that is highest in the achievement 
and all that is most romantic in the passion of 
Greece. For it was the prerogative of this form of 
love, in its finer manifestations, that it passed 
beyond persons to objective ends, linking emotion 
to action in a life of common danger and toil. Not 
only, nor primarily, the physical sense was touched, 
but mainly and in chief the imagination and intel- 
lect. The affection of Achilles for Patroclus is as 
intense as that of a lover for his mistress, but it has 
in addition a body and depth such as only years 
of common labour could impart. ‘Achilles wept, 
remembering his dear comrade, nor did sleep that 
conquereth all take hold of him, but he kept turn- 
ing himself to this side and to that, yearning for 
Patroclus’ manhood and excellent valour, and all the 
toils he achieved with him and the woes he bare, 


1 Plutarch, Pelopidas. ch. 18—Ed. by Clough. 


— 186 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


cleaving the battles of men and the grievous waves, 
As he thought thereon he shed big tears, now lying 
on his side, now on his back, now on his face; and 
then anon he would arise upon his feet and roam 
wildly beside the beach of the salt sea.” 1 That is 
the ideal spirit of Greek comradeship—each sup- 
porting the other in his best efforts and aims, mind 
assisting mind and hand hand, and the end of the 
love residing not in an easy satisfaction of itself, but 
in the development and perfecting of the souls in 
which it dwelt. 

Of such a love we have a record in the elegies of 
Theognis, in which the poet has embodied, for the 
benefit of Kurnus his friend, the ripe experience of 
an eventful life. ‘The poems for the most part are 
didactic in character, consciously and deliberately 
aimed at the instruction and guidance of the man 
to whom they are addressed; but every now and 
again the passion breaks through which informs and 
inspires this virile intercourse, and in such a passage 
as the following gives us the key to this and to all 
the finer friendships of the Greeks: 


“Lo, I have given thee wings wherewith to fly 
Over the boundless ocean and the earth; 
Yea, on the lips of many shalt thou lie, 

The comrade of their banquet and their mirth. 
Youths in their loveliness shall bid thee sound 
Upon the silver flute’s melodious breath; 
And when thou goest darkling underground 

Down to the lamentable house of death, 


1Tliad XXIV. 3.—Translated by Lang, Leaf, and 
Myers. 


FRIENDSHIP 187 


Oh yet not then from honour shalt thou cease 
But wander, an imperishable name, 

Kurnus, about the seas and shores of Greece, 

Crossing from isle to isle the barren main. 

Horses thou shalt not need, but lightly ride 
Sped by the Muses of the violet crown, 

And men to come, while earth and sun abide, 
Who cherish song shall cherish thy renown. 

Yea, I have given thee wings, and in return 
Thou givest me the scorn with which I burn.’ ? 


It was his insistence on friendship as an incentive 
to a noble life that was the secret of the power 
of Socrates. Listen, for example, to the account 
which Plutarch gives of his influence upon the 
young Alcibiades: 

“Alcibiades, listening now to language entirely 
free from every thought of unmanly fondness and 
silly displays of affection, finding himself with one 
who sought to lay open to him the deficiencies of 
his mind, and repress his vain and foolish arrogance, 


‘Dropped like the craven cock his conquered wing.’ 


He esteemed these endeavours of Socrates as most 
truly a means which the gods made use of for the 
care and preservation of youth, and began to think 
meanly of himself, and to admire him; to be pleased 
with his kindness, and to stand in awe of his virtue; 
and, unawares to himself, there became formed in 
his mind that reflex image and reciprocation of love, 
or Anteros, that Plato talks of. . . . Though Soc- 
rates had many and powerful rivals, yet the natural 


1 Theognis, 237. 


188 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


good qualities of Alcibiades gave his affection the 
mastery. His words overcame him so much, as to 
draw tears from his eyes, and to disturb his very 
soul. Yet sometimes he would abandon himself to 
flatterers, when they proposed to him varieties of 
pleasure, and would desert Socrates; who then would 
pursue him, as if he had been a fugitive slave. He 
despised every one else, and had no reverence or awe 
for any but him.” 4 

The relation thus established may be further 
illustrated by the following graceful little anecdote. 
Socrates and Alcibiades were fellow-soldiers at 
Potidea and shared the same tent. In a stiff 
engagement both behaved with gallantry. At last 
Alcibiades fell wounded, and Socrates, standing over 
him, defended and finally saved him. For this he 
might fairly have claimed the customary prize of 
valour; but he insisted on resigning it to his friend, 
as an incentive to his ‘ambition for noble deeds.” 

Another illustration of the power of this passion 
to evoke and stimulate courage is given in the story 
of Cleomachus, narrated by Plutarch. In a battle 
between the Chalcidians and the Eretrians, the 
cavalry of the former being hard pressed, Cleo- 
machus was called upon to make a diversion. He 
turned to his friend and asked him if he intended 
to be a spectator of the struggle; the youth re- 
plied in the affirmative, and embracing his friend, 
with his own hands buckled on his helmet; where- 
upon Cleomachus charged with impetuosity, routed 
the foe and died gloriously fighting. And thence- 


1Plut. Alc. ch. 4—Ed. by Clough. 


FRIENDSHIP 1389 


forth, says Plutarch, the Chalcidians, who had 
previously mistrusted such friendships, cultivated 
and honoured them more than any other people. 

So much indeed were the Greeks impressed with 
the manliness of this passion, with its power to 
prompt to high thought and heroic action, that some 
of the best of them set the love of man for man far 
above that of man for woman. ‘The one, they main- 
tained, was primarily of the spirit, the other pri- 
marily of the flesh; the one bent upon shaping to the 
type of all manly excellence both the body and the 
soul of the beloved, the other upon a passing 
pleasure of the senses. And they noted that among 
the barbarians, who were subject to tyrants, this 
passion was discouraged, along with gymnastics and 
philosophy, because it was felt by their masters that 
it would be fatal to their power; so essentially was 
it the prerogative of freedom, so incompatible with 
the nature and the status of a slave. 

It is in the works of Plato that this view is most 
completely and exquisitely set forth. To him, love 
is the beginning of all wisdom; and among all the 
forms of love, that one in chief, which is conceived 
by one man for another, of which the main operation 
and end is in the spirit, and which leads on and out 
from the passion for a particular body and soul to an 
enthusiasm for that highest beauty, wisdom, and 
excellence, of which the most perfect mortal forms 
are but a faint and inadequate reflection. Such a 
love is the initiation into the higher life, the spring 
at once of virtue, of philosophy, and of religion. 
Always operative in practice in Greek life it was not 


190 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


invented but interpreted by Plato. The philosopher 
merely gave an ideal expression to what was stirring 
in the heart of every generous youth; and the 
passage which we have selected for quotation may 
be taken as representative not only of the person- 
ality of Plato, but of the higher aspect of a char- 
acteristic phase of Greek civilization. 

“And now, taking my leave of you, I will rehearse 
a tale of love which I heard from Diotima of Manti- 
neia, a woman wise in this and in many other kinds 
of knowledge. She was my instructress in the art of 
love, and I shall repeat to you what she said to me: 
‘On the birthday of Aphrodite there was a feast 
of the gods, at which the god Poros or Plenty, who 
is the son of Metis or Discretion, was one of the 
guests. When the feast was over, Penia or Poverty, 
as the manner is on such occasions, came about the 
doors to beg. Now Plenty, who was the worse 
for nectar (there was no wine in those days), went 
into the garden of Zeus and fell into a heavy sleep; 
and Poverty considering her own straitened cir- 
cumstances, plotted to have a child by him, and 
accordingly she lay down at his side and conceived 
Love, who partly because he is naturally a lover of 
the beautiful, and because Aphrodite is herself 
beautiful, and also because he was born on her 
birthday, is her follower and attendant. And as 
his parentage is, so also are his fortunes. In the 
first place he is always poor, and anything but tender 
and fair, as the many imagine him; and he is 
rough and squalid, and has no shoes, nor a house 
to dwell in; on the bare earth exposed he lies under 


FRIENDSHIP 191 


the open heaven, in the streets, or at the doors of 
houses, taking his rest; and like his mother he is 
always in distress. Like his father too, whom he 
also partly resembles, he is always plotting against 
the fair and good; he i is bold, enterprising, strong, a 

mighty hunter, always weenie some intrigue or 
other, keen in the pursuit of wisdom, fertile in re- 
sources; a philosopher at all times, terrible as an 
enchanter, sorcerer, sophist. He is by nature 
neither mortal nor immortal, but alive and flourish- 
ing at one moment when he is in plenty, and dead 
at another moment, and again alive by reason of 
his father’s nature. But that which is always flow- 
ing in is always flowing out, and so he is never 
in want and never in wealth; and, further, he is 
in a mean between ignorance and knowledge. The 
truth of the matter is this: No god is a philosopher 
or seeker after wisdom, neither do the ignorant seek 
after wisdom. For herein is the evil of ignorance, 
that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless 
satisfied with himself: he has no desire for that of 
which he feels no want.’ ‘But who then, Diotima,’ — 
I said, ‘are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither 

the wise nor the foolish?’ ‘A child may answer that 
question,’ she replied; ‘they are those who are ina 
mean between the two: Love is one of them. For 
wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the 
beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher 
or lover of wisdom, and being a lover of wisdom is 
in a mean between the wise and the ignorant. And 
of this too his birth is the cause; for his father is 
wealthy and wise, and his mother poor and foolish. 


192 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


Such, my dear Socrates, is the nature of the spirit 
Love.’ 

“T said: ‘O thou stranger woman, thou sayest 
well; but, assuming Love to be such as you say, 
what is the use of him to man?’ 

““That, Socrates,’ she replied, ‘I will attempt to 
unfold: of his nature and birth I have already 
spoken; and you acknowledge that Love is of the 
beautiful. But some one will say: Of the beauti- 
ful in what, Socrates and Diotima? or rather let 
me put the question more clearly, and ask: When a 
man loves the beautiful, what does he desire?’ 

“I answered her, “That the beautiful may be his.’ 

‘Still,’ she said, ‘the answer suggests a further 
question: What is given by the possession of 
beauty ?’ 

‘““*To what you have asked,’ I said, ‘I have no 
answer ready.’ 

“‘*Then,’ she said, ‘let me put the word “good” 
in the place of “beautiful,’’ and repeat the question 
once more: If he who loves, loves the good, what 
is it then that he loves?’ 

‘““*The possession of the good,’ I said. 

“And what does he gain who possesses the 
good?’ 

‘‘ ‘Ffappiness,’ I replied; ‘there is less difficulty in 
answering that question.’ 

‘““<Ves,’ she said, ‘the happy are made happy by 
the acquisition of good things. Nor is there any 
need to ask why a man desires happiness; the an- 
swer is already final.’ 

“Vou are right,’ I said. 


FRIENDSHIP 193 


“‘And is this wish and this desire common to all? 
and do all men always desire their own good, or 
only some men?—what say you?’ 

“All men,’ I replied; ‘the desire is common to 
all.’ 

‘““*Then,’ she said, ‘the simple truth is that men 
love the good.’ 

“Ves,” I said. 

‘“**To which must be added that they love the 
possession of the good?’ 

“*That must be added too.’ 

‘Then love,’ she said, ‘may be described gener- 
ally as the love of the everlasting possession of the 
good?’ 

“That is most true.’ 

“Then if this be the nature of love, can you tell 
me further,’ she said, ‘what is the manner of the 
pursuit? what are they doing who show all this 
eagerness and heat which is called love? and what is 
the object which they have in view? Answer me.’ 

“ “Nay, Diotima,’ I replied, ‘if I had known, I 
should not have wondered at your wisdom, neither 
should I have come to learn from you about this 
very matter.’ 

“ “Well,” she said, ‘I will teach you:—The object 
which they have in view is birth in beauty, whether 
of body or soul.’ 

‘““*T do not understand you,’ I said; ‘the oracle 
requires an explanation.’ 

““T will make my meaning clearer,’ she replied. 
‘I mean to say, that all men are bringing to the 
birth in their bodies and in their souls. There is a 


194 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


certain age at which human nature is desirous of 
procreation—procreation which must be in beauty 
and not in deformity; and this procreation is the 
union of man and woman, and is a divine thing: for 
conception and generation are an immortal principle 
in the mortal creature, and in the inharmonious they 
can never be. But the deformed is always inhar- 
monious with the divine, and the beautiful har- 
monious. Beauty, then, is the destiny or goddess 
of parturition who presides at birth, and therefore, 
when approaching beauty, the conceiving power is 
propitious, and diffusive, and benign, and begets and 
bears fruit: at the sight of ugliness she frowns and 
contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away, 
and shrivels up, and not without a pang refrains 
from conception. And this is the reason why, when 
the hour of conception arrives, and the teeming na- 
ture is full, there is such a flutter and ecstasy about 
beauty whose approach is the alleviation of the 
pain of travail. For love, Socrates, is not as you 
imagine, the love of the beautiful only.’ 

“What then?’ 

“<The love of generation and of birth in beauty.’ 

Sy es.) Salde 

‘Yes indeed,’ she replied. 

““But why of generation?’ 

‘“‘ ‘Because to the mortal creature, generation is a 
sort of eternity and immortality,’ she replied; ‘and 
if, as has been already admitted, love is of the ever- 
lasting possession of the good, all men will neces- 
sarily desire immortality together with good: where- 
fore love is of immortality.’ 


FRIENDSHIP 195 


“T was astonished at her words and said: ‘Is this 
really true, O thou wise Diotima?’ 

“And she answered with all the authority of an 
accomplished sophist: ‘Of that, Socrates, you may 
be assured;—think only of the ambition of men, and 
you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, 
unless you consider how they are stirred by the love 
of an immortality of fame. They are ready to run 
all risks greater far then they would have run for 
their children, and to spend money and undergo any 
sort of toil, and even to die, for the sake of leaving 
behind them a name which shall be eternal. Do 
you imagine that Alcestis would have died to save 
Admetus, or Achilles to avenge Patroclus, or your 
own Codrus in order to preserve the kingdom for his 
sons, if they had not imagined that the memory of 
their virtues, which still survives among us, would 
be immortal? Nay,’ she said, ‘I am persuaded that 
all men do all things, and the better they are the 
more they do them, in hope of the glorious fame of 
immortal virtue; for they desire the immortal. 

““*Those who are pregnant in the body only, 
betake themselves to women and beget children— 
this is the character of their love: their offspring, as 
they hope, will preserve their memory and give them 
the blessedness and immortality which they desire 
in the future. But souls which are pregnant—for 
there certainly are men who are more creative in 
their souls than in their bodies—conceive that which 
is proper for the soul to conceive or contain. And 
what are these conceptions? wisdom and virtue in 
general. And such creators are poets and all artists 


196 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


who are deserving of the name inventor. But the 
greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far is that 
which is concerned with the ordering of states and 
families, and which is called temperance and jus- 
tice. And he who in youth has the seed of these 
implanted in him and is himself inspired, when he 
comes to maturity desires to beget and generate. 
He wanders about, seeking beauty that he may be- 
get offspring—for in deformity he will beget noth- 
ing—and naturally embraces the beautiful rather 
than the deformed body; above all, when he finds 
a fair and noble and well-nurtured soul, he embraces 
the two in one person, and to such a one he is full 
of speech about virtue and the nature and pursuits 
of a good man; and he tries to educate him; and at 
the touch of the beautiful which is ever present 
to his memory, even when absent, he brings forth 
that which he had conceived long before, and in 
company with him tends that which he brings forth; 
and they are married by a far nearer tie and have 
a closer friendship than those who beget mortal 
children, for the children who are their common 
offspring are fairer and more immortal. Who, when 
he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great 
poets, would not rather have their children than 
ordinary ones? Who would not emulate them in 
the creation of children such as theirs, which have 
preserved their memory and given them everlasting 
glory? Or who would not have such children as 
Lycurgus left behind him to be the saviours not 
only of Lacedemon, but of Hellas, as one may say? 
There is Solon, too, who is the revered father of 


:, FRIENDSHIP 197 


Athenian laws; and many others there are in many 
other places, both among Hellenes and barbarians, 
who have given to the world many noble works, 
and have been the parents of virtue of every kind; 
and many temples have been raised in their honour 
for the sake of children such as theirs; which were 
never raised in honour of any one, for the sake of 
his mortal children. 

“““These are the lesser mysteries of love, into 
which even you, Socrates, may enter; to the greater 
and more hidden ones which are the crown of these, 
and to which, if you pursue them in a right spirit, 
they will lead, I know not whether you will be able 
to attain. But I will do my utmost to inform you, 
and do you follow if you can. For he who would 
proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth 
to visit beautiful forms; and first, if he be guided by 
his instructor aright, to love one such form only— 
out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon 
he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one 
form is akin to the beauty of another; and then if 
beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish 
would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every 
form is one and the same! And when he perceives 
this he will abate his violent love of the one, which 
he will despise and deem a small thing, and will 
become a lover of all beautiful forms. In the next 
stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind 
is more honourable than the outward form. So 
that, if a virtuous soul have but a little comeliness, 
he will be content to love and tend him, and will 
search out and bring to the birth thoughts which 


198 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


may improve the young, until he is compelled to 
contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and 
laws, and to understand that the beauty of them 
all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a 
trifle; and after laws and institutions he will go on 
to the sciences, that he may see their beauty, being 
not like a servant in love with the beauty of one 
youth or man or institution, himself a slave mean 
and narrow-minded, but drawing towards and con- 
templating the vast sea of beauty, he will create 
many fair and noble thoughts and notions in bound- 
less love of wisdom; until on that store he grows 
and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed 
to him of a single science which is the science of 
beauty everywhere. To this I will proceed; please 
to give me your very best attention: 

‘“¢‘FTe who has been instructed thus far in the 
things of love, and who has learned to see the 
beautiful in due order and succession, when he 
comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a 
nature of wondrous beauty (and this, Socrates, 
is the final cause of all our former toils)—a nature 
which in the first place is everlasting, not grow- 
ing and decaying, or waxing and waning; secondly, 
not fair in one point of view and foul in another, 
or at one time or in one relation or in one place 
fair, at another time or in another relation or at 
another place foul, as if fair to some and foul to 
others, or in the likeness of a face or hands or 
any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form 
of speech or knowledge, or existing in any other be- 
ing, as for example, in an animal, or in heaven, or 


FRIENDSHIP 199 


in earth, or in any other place; but beauty absolute, 
separate, simple, and everlasting, which without 
diminution and without increase, or any change, is 
imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties 
of all other things. He who, from these ascend- 
ing under the influence of true love, begins to per- 
ceive that beauty, is not far from the end. And 
the true order of going, or being led by another, 
to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties 
of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that 
other beauty, using these as steps only, and from 
one going on to two, and from two to all fair 
forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and 
from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair 
notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, 
and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. 
This, my dear Socrates,’ said the stranger of Man- 
tineia, ‘is that life above all others which man 
should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute: 
a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see 
not to be after the measure of gold, and gar- 
ments, and fair boys and youths, whose presence 
now entrances you; and you and many a one 
would be content to live seeing them only and 
conversing with them without meat or drink, if 
that were possible;—you only want to look at them 
and to be with them. But what if man had eyes 
to see the true beauty—the divine beauty, I mean, 
pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the 
pollutions of mortality and all the colours and 
vanities of human life—thither looking, and hold- 
ing converse with the true beauty simple and divine? 


200 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


Remember how in that communion only, behold- 
ing beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be 
enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but 
realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a 
reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true 
virtue to become the friend of God and be im- 
mortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an 
ignoble life?’ 

“Such, Phaedrus—and I speak not only to you, 
but to all of you—were the words of Diotima; and 
I am persuaded of their truth. And being per- 
suaded of them, I try to persuade others, that in 
the attainment of this end human nature will not 
easily find a helper better than Love. And there- 
fore, also, I say that every man ought to honour 
him as I myself honour him, and walk in his ways, 
and exhort others to do the same, and praise the 
power and spirit of Love according to the measure 
of my ability now and ever.” } 

I have thought it worth while to quote this pas- 
sage, in spite of its length, partly for the sake of 
its own intrinsic beauty, partly because no account 
of the Greek view of life could be complete which 
did not insist upon the prominence in their civili- 
zation of the passion of friendship, and its capacity 
of being turned to the noblest uses. That there 
was another side to the matter goes without say- 
ing. This passion, like any other, has its depths, 
as well as its heights; and the ideal of friendship 
conceived by Plato was as remote, perhaps, from 


1 Plato, Symp. 201.—Translated by Jowett. 


SUMMARY 201 


the experience of the average man, as Dante’s pre- 
sentation of the love between man and woman. 
Still, the fact remains that it was friendship of 
this kind that supplied to the Greek that element 
of romance which plays so large a part in modern 
life; and it is to this, and not to the relations be- 
tween men and women, that we must look for the 
highest reaches of their emotional experience. 


§ 11. SuMMARY 


If now we turn back to take a general view of 
the points that have been treated in the present 
chapter, we shall notice, in the first place, that the 
ideal of the Greeks was the direct and natural out- 
come of the conditions of their life. It was not 
something beyond and above the experience of 
the class to which it applied, but rather, was the 
formula of that experience itself: in philosophical 
phrase, it was immanent not transcendent: Be- 
cause there really was a class of soldier-citizens 
free from the necessity of mechanical toil, pos- 
sessed of competence and leisure, and devotine 
these advantages willingly to the service of the 
state, therefore their ideal of conduct took the 
form we have described. It was the ideal of a 
privileged class, and postulated for its realization, 
not only a strenuous endeavour on the part of the 
individual, but also certain adventitious gifts of 
fortune, such as health, wealth, “and fa family connec- 
tions. ‘These were conditions that actually obtained 
among members of the class concerned; so that 


202 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


the ideal in question was not a mere abstract 
“ought,” but an expression of what, approximately 
at least, was realized in fact. 

But this, which was the strength of the ideal 
of the Greeks, was also its limitation. Their ethi- 
cal system rested not only on universal facts of 
human nature, but also on a particular and transi- 
tory social arrangement. When therefore the city- 
state, with its sharp antithesis of classes, began 
to decline, the ideal of the soldier-citizen declined 
also. The conditions of its realization no longer 
existed, and ethical conceptions passed into a new 
phase. In the first place the ideal of conduct was 
extended so as to apply to man as man, instead 
of to a particular class in a particular form of 
state; and in the second place, as a corollary of 
this, those external goods of fortune which were 
the privilege of the few, could no longer be assumed 
as conditions of an ideal which was supposed to 
apply to all. Consequently, the new ideal was con- 
ceived as wholly internal. To be virtuous was to 
act under the control of the universal reason which 
was supposed to dwell in man as man; and such 
action was independent of all the gifts of chance. 
It was as open to a slave as to a freeman, to an 
artisan as to a soldier or a statesman. The changes 
and chances of this mortal life were indifferent to 
the virtuous man; on the rack as on the throne 
he was lord of himself and free. 

This conception of the Stoics broke down the 
limitation of the Greek ideal by extending the possi- 
bility of virtue to all mankind. But at the same 


SUMMARY 203 


time it destroyed its sanity and balance. For it 
was precisely because of its limitation that the 
ideal of the Greeks was, approximately at least, 
an account of what was, and not merely of what 
ought to be. A man possessed of wealth and 
friends, of leisure, health, and culture, really could 
and did achieve the end at which he was aiming; 
but the conception of one who without any such 
advantages, on the contrary with positive dis- 
advantages, poor, sickly, and a slave perhaps, or 
even in prison or on the rack, should nevertheless 
retain unimpaired the dignity of manhood and the 
freedom of his own soul,—such a conception if it 
is not chimerical, is at any rate so remote from 
common experience, that it is not capable of serv- 
ing as a really practical ideal for ordinary life. 
But an ideal so remote that its realization is des- 
paired of, is as good as none. And the conception 
of the Stoics, if it was more comprehensive than 
that of Aristotle, was also less practical and real. 
By virtue, nevertheless, of this comprehensiveness, 
the Stoic ideal is more akin to modern tendencies 
than that of the soldier-citizen in the city-state. To 
provide for the excellence of a privileged class at 
the expense of the rest of the community is be- 
coming to us increasingly impossible in fact and 
intolerable in idea. But while admitting this, we 
cannot but note that the Greeks, at whatever cost, 
did actually achieve a development of the in- 
dividual more high and more complete than has 
been even approached by any other age. Whether 
it will ever be possible, under totally different condi- 


204 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


tions, to realize once more that balance of body and 
soul, that sanity of ethical intuition, that frank 
recognition of the whole range of our complex hu- 
man nature with a view to its harmonious organ- 
ization under the control of a lucid reason—whether 
it will ever be possible again to realize this ideal, 
and that not only in the members of a privileged 
class, but in the whole body of the state, is a ques- 
tion too problematical to be raised with advantage 
in this place. But it is impossible not to perceive 
that with the decline of the Greek city-state some- 
thing passed from the world which it can never 
cease to regret, and the recovery of which, if it 
might be, in some more perfect form, must be the 
goal of its highest practical endeavours. Immense, 
no doubt, is the significance of the centuries that 
have intervened, but it is a significance of prepara- 
tion; and when we look beyond the means to the 
wished-for end, limiting our conceptions to the ac- 
tual possibilities of life on earth, it is among the 
Greeks that we seek the record of the highest 
achievement of the past, and the hope of the highest 
possibilities of the future. 


CHAPTER IV 
THE GREEK VIEW OF ART 


§ 1. GREEK ART AN EXPRESSION OF NATIONAL 
LIFE 


N approaching the subject of the Art of the 
Greeks we come to what, more plausibly than 
any other, may be regarded as the central point 


of their scheme of life. We have already noticed, | 
in dealing with other topics, how constantly the \ 


esthetic point of view emerges and predominates | 


in matters with which, in the modern way of look- 
ing at things, it appears to have no direct and 
natural connection. We saw, for example, how in- 
separable in their religion was the element of ritual 
and ceremony from that of idea; how in their 
ethical conceptions the primary notion was that 
of beauty; how they aimed throughout at a per- 
fect balance of body and soul, and more generally, 


in every department, at an expression of the inner | 


by the outer so complete and perfect that the con- 
ception of a separation of the two became almost 
as impossible to their thought as it would have 
been unpleasing and discordant to their feeling. 
Now such a point of view is, in fact, that of art; 


and philosophers of history have been amply justi- 
205 


| 


4 
: 


206 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


fied in characterizing the whole Greek epoch as 
pre-eminently that of Beauty. 

But if this be a true way of regarding the 
matter, we should expect to find that art and beauty 
had, for the Greeks, a very wide and complex 
significance. There is a view of art, and it is one 
that appears to be prevalent in our own time, 
which sets it altogether outside the general trend 
of national life and ideas; which asserts that it 
has no connection with ethics, religion, politics, 
or any of the general conceptions which regulate 
-action and thought; that its end is in itself, and 
\is simply beauty; and that in beauty there is no 
‘distinction of high or low, no preference of one 
kind above another. Art thus conceived is, in the 
first place, purely subjective in character; the 
artist alone is the standard, and any phase or mood 
of his, however exceptional, personal and transi- 
tory, is competent to produce a work of art as 
satisfying and as great as one whose inspiration 
was drawn from a nation’s life, reflecting its high- 
est moments, and its most universal aspirations 
and ideals; so that, for example, a butterfly drawn 
by Mr. Whistler would rank as high, say, as the 
Parthenon. And in the second place, in this view 
of art, the subject is a matter of absolute indiffer- 
ence. The standards of ordinary life, ethical or 
other, do not apply; there is no better or worse, but 
only a more or less beautiful; and the representa- 
tion of a music-hall stage or a public-house bar 
may be as great and perfect a work of art as the 
Venus of Milo or the Madonna of Raphael. 


Lad 


ART AND NATIONAL LIFE 207 


This theory, which arises naturally and perhaps 
inevitably in an age where national life has de- 
generated into materialism and squalor, and the 
artist feels himself a stranger in a world of Philis- 
tines, we need not here pause to examine and 
criticize. It has been mentioned merely to illustrate 
by contrast the Greek view, which was diametrically 
opposed to this, and valued art in proportion as. 
it represented in perfect form the highest and most 
comprehensive aspects of the national ideal. 

To say this, is not, of course, to say that the 
Greek conception of art was didactic; for the word 
didactic, when applied to art, has usually the im- 
plication that the excellence of the moral is the 
only point to be considered, and that if that is good 
the work itself must be good. This idea does in- 
deed occur in Greek thought—we find it, for ex- 
ample, paradoxically enough, in so great an artist 
as Plato—but if it had been the one which really 
determined their production, there would have been 
no occasion to write this chapter, for there would 
have been no Greek art to write about. The 
truer account of the impulse that urged them to 
create is that given also by Plato in an earlier and 
more impassioned work, in which he describes it 
as a “madness of those who are possessed by the 
Muses; which enters into a delicate and virgin 
soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyrical and 
all other numbers; with these adorning the myriad 
actions of ancient heroes for the instruction of 
posterity. But he who having no touch of the 
Muses’ madness in his soul, comes to the door and 


208 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


thinks that he will get into the temple by the help 
of art—he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; 
the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters 
into rivalry with the madman.” + 

The presupposition, in fact, of all that can be 
said about the Greek view of art, is that primarily 
and to begin with they were, by nature, artists. 
Judged simply by the esthetic standard, without 
any consideration of subject matter at all, or any 
reference to intellectual or ethical ideals, they 
created works of art more purely beautiful than 
those of any other age or people. Their mere 
household crockery, their common pots and pans, 
are cast in shapes exquisitely graceful, and painted 
in designs admirably drawn and composed; and the 
little clay figures they used as we do china orna- 
ments put to shame some of the most ambitious 
efforts of modern sculpture. Who, for example, 
would not rather look at a Tanagra statuette than 
at the equestrian statue of the Duke of Welling- 
ton? 

The Greeks, in fact, quite apart from any theories 
they may have held, were artists through and 
through; and that is a fact we must carry with 
us through the whole of our discussion. 


§ 2. IDENTIFICATION OF THE A‘STHETIC AND 
EtHiIcaL Pormnts oF VIEW 


But on the other hand, it seems to be clear 
from all that we can learn, that their habitual way 
1 Plato, Phaedrus, 245 a.—Translated by Jowett. 


AESTHETICS AND ETHICS 209 


of regarding works of art was not to judge them 
simply and exclusively by their esthetic value. 
On the contrary, in criticizing two works other- 


wise equally beautiful, they would give a higher \ 


place to the one or the other for its ethical or quasi- | 


ethical qualities. This indeed is what we should 
expect from the comprehensive sense which, as we 
have seen, attached in their tongue to the word 
which we render “beautiful.” 


The esthetic and ethical spheres, in fact, were | 
never sharply distinguished by the Greeks; and it | 


follows that as, on the one hand, their conception 
of the good was identified with that of the beauti- 
ful, so, on the other hand, their conception of the 
beautiful was identified with that of the good. Thus 
the most beautiful work of art, in the Greek sense 
of the term, was that which made the finest and 
most harmonious appeal not only to the physical but 
to the moral sense, and while communicating the 
highest and most perfect pleasure to the eye or the 
ear, had also the power to touch and inform the 
soul with the grace which was her moral excellence. 
Of this really characteristic Greek conception, this 
fusion, so instinctive as to be almost unconscious, 
of the esthetic and ethical points of view, no better 
illustration could be given than the following pas- 
sage from the Republic of Plato, where the philos- 
opher is describing the effect of beautiful works of 
art, and especially of music, on the moral and in- 
tellectual character of his imaginary citizens: 
“We would not have our guardians grow up amid 
images of moral deformity, as in some noxious 


| 


210 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a 
baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, 
until they silently gather a festering mass of corrup- 
tion in their own soul. Let our artists rather be 
those who are gifted to discern the true nature of 
the beautiful and graceful: then will our youth 
dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and 
sounds, and receive the good in everything; and 
beauty, and effluence of fair works, shall flow into 
the eye and ear, like a health-giving breeze from a 
purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from 
earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the 
beauty of reason.’ 

«There can be no nobler training than that,’ he 
replied. 
_ “And therefore,’ I said, ‘Glaucon, musical train- 
_ing is a more potent instrument than any other, 
because rhythm and harmony find their way into 
the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily 
fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of 
him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him 
who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because 
he who has received this true education of the 
inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions 
or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, 
while he praises and rejoices over and receives into 
his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he 
will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the 
days of his youth, even before he is able to 
know the reason why: and when reason comes he 
will recognize and salute the friend with whom 


+ AESTHETICS AND ETHICS 211 


his education has made him long familiar.’ ” ! 

This fusion of the ideas of the beautiful and the 
good is the central point in the Greek Theory of 
Art; and it enables us to understand how it was 
that they conceived art to be educational. Its end, 
in their view, was not only pleasure, though pleasure 
was essential to it; but also, and just as much, 
edification. Plato, indeed, here again exaggerating 
the current view, puts the edification above the 
pleasure. He criticizes Homer as he might criticize 
a moral philosopher, pointing out the inadequacy, 
from an ethical point of view, of his conception of 
heaven and of the gods, and dismissing as injurious 
and of bad example to youthful citizens the whole 
tissue of passionate human feeling, the irrepressible 
outbursts of anger and grief and fear, by virtue of 
which alone the Iliad and the Odyssey are immortal 
poems instead of ethical tracts. And finally, with a 
half reluctant assent to the course of his own argu- 
ment, he excludes the poets altogether from his ideal 
republic, on the ground that they encourage their 
hearers in that indulgence of emotion which it is 
the object of every virtuous man to repress. The 
conclusion of Plato, by his own admission, was half 
paradoxical, and it certainly never recommended 
itself to such a nation of artists as the Greeks. But 
it illustrates, nevertheless, the general bent of their 
views of art, that tendency to the identification of 
the beautiful and the good, which, while it was never 


1 Plato, Republic III. 401.—Translated by Jowett. 


Ze THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE& 


pushed so far as to choke art with didactics—for 
Plato himself, even against his own will, isa poet— 
yet served to create a standard of taste which was 
ethical as much as esthetic, and made the judgment 
of beauty also a judgment of moral worth. 

Quite in accordance with this view we find that 
the central aim of all Greek art is the representation 
of human character and human ideals. The inter- 
pretation of “nature” for its own sake (in the 
narrower sense in which “nature” is opposed to 
man) is a modern and romantic development that 
would have been unintelligible to a Greek. Not 
that the Greeks were without a sense of what we 
call the beauties of nature, but that they treat them 
habitually, not as the centre of interest, but as the 
background to human activity. The most beauti- 
ful descriptions of nature to be found in Greek 
poetry occur, incidentally only, in the choral odes 
introduced into their dramas; and among all their 
pictures of which we have any record there is not 
one that answers to the description of a landscape; 
the subject is always mythological or historical, and 
the representation of nature merely a setting for 
the main theme. And on the other hand, the art 
for which the Greeks are most famous, and in which 
they have admittedly excelled all other peoples, is 
that art of sculpture whose special function it is 
not only to represent but to idealize the human 
form, and which is peculiarly adapted to embody 
for the sense not only physical but ethical types. 
And, more remarkable still, as we shall have occa- 
sion to observe later, the very art which modern 


vs SCULPTURE AND PAINTING 213 


men regard as the most devoid of all intellectual 
content, “the most incommensurable with any 
standard except that of pure beauty—I refer of 
course to the art of music—was invested by the 
Greeks with a definite moral content and worked 
into their general theory of art as a direct inter- 
pretation of human life. The excellence of man, | 
in short, directly or indirectly, was the point about 
which Greek art turned; that excellence was at 
once esthetic and ethical; and the representation 
of what was beautiful involved also the repre- 
sentation of what was good. This point we will 
now proceed to illustrate more in detail in con- 
nection with the various special branches of art. 


§ 3. SCULPTURE AND PAINTING 


Let us take, first, the plastic arts, sculpture and 
painting; and to bring into clear relief the Greek 
point of view let us contrast with it that of the 
modern “impressionist.” To the impressionist a 
picture is simply an arrangement of colour and line; 
the subject represented is nothing, the treatment 
everything. It would be better, on the whole, not 
even to know what objects are depicted; and, to 
judge the picture by a comparison with the objects, 
or to consider what is the worth of the objects in 
themselves, or what we might think of them if we 
came across them in the connections of ordinary life, 
is simply to misconceive the whole meaning of a 
picture. For the artist and for the man who under- 
stands art, all scales and standards disappear ex: 


214 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


cept that of the purely esthetic beauty which con. 
sists in harmony of line and tone; the most perfect 
human form has no more value than a splash of 
mud; or rather both mud and human form dis- 
appear as irrelevant, and all that is left for judg- 
ment is the arrangement of colour and form origi- 
nally suggested by those accidental and indifferent 
phenomena. 

In the Greek view, on the other hand, though 
we certainly cannot say that the subject was every- 
thing and the treatment nothing (for that would 
be merely the annihilation of art) yet we may assert 
that, granted the treatment, granted that the work 
was beautiful (the first and indispensable require- 
ment), its worth was determined by the character 
‘of the subject. Sculpture and painting, in fact, 
to the Greeks, were not merely a medium of 
esthetic pleasure; they were ways of expressing 
and interpreting national life. As such they were 
subordinated to religion. The primary end of 
sculpture was to make statues of the gods and 
heroes; the primary end of painting was to repre- 
sent mythological scenes; and in either case the 
purely esthetic pleasure was also a means to a re- 
ligious experience. 

Let us take, for example, the statue of Zeus at 
Olympia, the most famous of the works of Pheidias. 
This colossal figure of ivory and gold was doubt- 
less, according to all the testimony we possess, from 
a merely esthetic point of view, among the most 
consummate creations of human genius. But what 
was the main aim of the artist who made it? what 


¥ SCULPTURE AND PAINTING 215 


the main effect on the spectator? The artist had 
designed and the spectator seemed to behold a con- 
crete image of that Homeric Zeus who was the 
centre of his religious consciousness—the Zeus who 
“nodded his dark brow, and the ambrosial locks 
waved from the King’s immortal head, and he made 
great Olympus quake.”? ‘Those who approach 
the temple,” said Lucian, “do not conceive that they 
see ivory from the Indies or gold from the mines 
of Thrace; no, but the very son of Kronos and 
Rhea, transported by Pheidias to earth and set to 
watch over the lonely plain of Pisa.” “He was,” 
says Dion Chrysostom, “the type of that unattained 
ideal, Hellas come to unity with herself; in ex- 
pression at once mild and awful, as befits the giver 
of life and all good gifts, the common father, saviour 
and guardian of men; dignified as a king, tender 
as a father, awful as giver of laws, kind as pro- 
tector of suppliants and friends, simple and great 
as giver of increase and wealth; revealing, in a 
word, in form and countenance, the whole array of 
gifts and qualities proper to his supreme divinity.” 
The description is characteristic of the whole aim | 
of Greek sculpture,—the representation not only | 
of beauty, but of character, not only of character, - 
but of character idealized. The statues of the vari- ~ 
ous gods derive their distinguishing individuality 
not merely from their association with conventional 
symbols, but from a concrete reproduction, in fea- 
tures, expression, drapery, pose, of the ethical and 


1 Tiad. I. 528.—Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers. 


216 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


intellectual qualities for which they stand. An 
Apollo differs in type from a Zeus, an Athene from 
a Demeter; and in every case the artist works from 
an intellectual conception, bent not simply on a 
graceful harmony of lines, but on the representa- 
tion of a character at once definite and ideal. 

Primarily, then, Greek sculpture was an ex- 
pression of the national religion; and therefore, 
also, of the national life. For, as we saw, the cult 
of the gods was the centre, not only of the re- 
ligious but of the political consciousness of Greece; 
and an art which was born and flourished in the 
temple and the sacred grove, naturally became the 
exponent of the ideal aspect of the state. It was 
thus, for example, that the Parthenon at Athens 
was at once the centre of the worship of Athene, 
and a symbol of the corporate life over which she 
presided; the statue of the goddess having as its 
appropriate complement the frieze over which the 
spirit of the city moved in stone. And thus, too, 
the statues of the victors at the Olympian games 
were dedicated in the sacred precinct, as a memorial 
of what was not only an athletic meeting, but also 
at once a centre of Hellenic unity and the most 
consummate expression of that aspect of their cul- 
ture which contributed at least as much to their 
esthetic as to their physical perfection. 

Sculpture, in fact, throughout, was subordinated 
to religion, and through religion to national life; and 
it was from this that it derived its ideal and in- 
tellectual character. And, so far as our author- 
ities enable us to judge, the same is true of painting. 


¢ 


SCULPTURE AND PAINTING 217 


The great pictures of which we have descriptions 
were painted to adorn temples and public build- 
ings, and represented either mythological or national 
themes. Such, for example, was the great work 
of Polygnotus at Delphi, in which was depicted on 
the one hand the sack of Troy, on the other the 
descent of Odysseus into Hades; and such his 
representation of the battle of Marathon, in the 
painted porch that led to the Acropolis of Athens. 
And even the vase paintings, of which we have in- 
numerable examples, and which are mere decora- 
tions of common domestic utensils, have often 
enough some story of gods and heroes for their 
theme, whereby over and above their purely esthetic 
value they made their appeal to the general re- 
ligious consciousness of Greece. Painting, like 
sculpture, had its end, in a sense, outside itself; 
and from this very fact derived its peculiar dignity, 
simplicity, and power. 

From this account of the plastic art of the Greeks 
it follows as a simple corollary, that their aim was 
not merely to reproduce but to transcend nature. 
For their subject was gods and heroes, and heroes 
and gods were superior to men. Of his idealizing 
tendency we have in sculpture evidence enough in 
the many examples which have been preserved to 
us; and with regard to painting there is curious 
literary testimony to the same effect. Aristotle, 
for example, remarks that “even if it is impossible 
that men should be such as Zeuxis painted them, 
yet it is better that he should paint them so; for the 
example ought to excel that for which it is an 


218 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


example.” + And in an imaginary conversation 
recorded between Socrates and Parrhasius the artist 
admits without any hesitation that more pleasure 
is to be derived from pictures of men who are 
morally good than from those of men who are mor- 
ally bad. In the Greek view, in fact, as we saw, 
physical and moral excellence went together, and 
it was excellence they sought to depict in their art; 
not merely esthetic beauty, though that was a 
necessary presupposition, but on the top of that, 
ideal types of character representative of their con- 
ception of the hero and the god. Art, in a word, 
was subordinate to the ethical ideal; or rather the 
ethical and esthetic ideals were not yet dissociated; 
and the greatest artists the world has ever known 
worked deliberately under the direction and in- 
spiration of the ideas that controlled and deter- 
mined the life of their time. 


§ 4. Music AND THE DANCE 


Turning now from the plastic arts to that other 
group which the Greeks classed together under the 
name of ‘‘Music’’—namely music, in the narrower 
sense, dancing and poetry—vwe find still more clearly 
emphasized and more elaborately worked out the 
subordination of esthetic to ethical and religious 
ends. “Music,” in fact, as they used the term, 
was the centre of Greek education, and its moral 
character thus became a matter of primary impor- 
tance. By it were formed, it was supposed, the 


1 Arist. Poet. XXV., 1461, 6. 12. 


MUSIC AND THE DANCE 219 


mind and temper of the citizens, and so the whole 
constitution of the state. ‘The introduction of a 
new kind of music,” says Plato, ‘must be shunned 
as imperilling the whole state; since styles of music 
are never disturbed without affecting the most im- 
portant political institutions.” “The new style,” 
he goes on, “gradually gaining a lodgment, quietly 
insinuates itself into manners and customs; and 
from these it issues in greater force, and makes its 
way into mutual compacts; and from compacts it 
goes on to attack laws and constitutions, displaying 
the utmost impudence, until it ends by overturning 
everything, both in public and in private.”’1 Andas 
in his Republic he had defined the character of the 
poetry that should be admitted into his ideal state, 
so in the “Laws” he specially defines the character 
ot the melodies and dances, regarding them as the 
most important factor in determining and preserving 
the manners and institutions of the citizens. 

Nothing, at first sight, to a modern mind, could 
be stranger than this point of view. That poetry 
has a bearing on conduct we can indeed understand, 
though we do not make poetry the centre of our 
system of education; but that moral effects should 
be attributed to music and to dancing, and that 
these should be regarded as of such importance as to 
influence profoundly the whole constitution of a 
state, will appear to the majority of modern men 
an unintelligible paradox. 


1Plato, Rep. IV., 424 c.—Translated by Davies and 
Vaughan. 


220 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


Yet no opinion of the Greeks is more profoundly 
characteristic than this of their whole way of regard- 
ing life, and none would better repay a careful 
study. That moral character should be attributed 
to the influence of music is only one and perhaps 
the most striking illustration of that general identi- 
fication by the Greeks of the ethical and the esthetic 
standards on which we have so frequently had occa- 
sion to insist. Virtue, in their conception, was not 
a hard conformity to a law felt as alien to the 
natural character; it was the free expression of a 
beautiful and harmonious soul: And~ this” very 
metaphor “harmonious,” which they so constantly 
employ, involves the idea of a close connection be- 
tween music and morals. Character, in the Greek 
view, is a certain proportion of the various elements 
of the soul, and the right character is the right pro- 
portion. But the relation in which these elements 
stand to one another could be directly affected, it 
was found, by means of music; not only could the 
different emotions be excited or assuaged in various 

degrees, but the whole relation of the emotional to 
' the rational element could be regulated and con- 
trolled by the appropriate melody and measure. 
That this connection between music and morals 
really does exist is recognized, in a rough and gen- 
eral way, by most people who have any musical 
sense. There are rhythms and tunes, for example, 
that are felt to be vulgar and base, and others that 
are felt to be ennobling; some music, Wagner’s, for 
instance, is frequently called immoral; Gounod is 
described as enervating, Beethoven as bracing, and 


MUSIC AND THE DANCE 2a) 


the like; and however absurd such comments may 
often appear to be in detail, underlying them is the 
undoubtedly well-grounded sense that various kinds 
of music have various ethical qualities. But it is 
just this side of music, which has been neglected in 
modern times, that was the one on which the Greeks 
laid most stress. Infinitely inferior to the moderns 
in the mechanical resources of the art, they had 
made, it appears, a far finer and closer analysis of 
its relation to emotional states; with the result that 
even in music, which we describe as the purest of 
the arts, congratulating ourselves on its absolute 
dissociation from all definite intellectual concep- 
tions,—even here the standard of the Greeks was as 
much ethical as esthetic, and the style of music was 
distinguished and its value appraised, not only by 
the pleasure to be derived from it, but also by the 
effect it tended to produce on character. 

Of this position we have a clear and definite state- 
ment in Aristotle. Virtue, he says, consists in lov- | 
ing and hating in the proper way, and implies, there- 
fore, a delight in the proper emotions; but emotions 
of any kind are produced by melody and rhythm; 
therefore by music a man becomes accustomed to 
feeling the right emotions. Music has thus the! 
power to form character; and the various kinds of 
music, based on the various modes, may be distin- 
guished by their effects on character—one, for 
example, working in the direction of melancholy, 
another of effeminacy; one encouraging abandon- 
ment, another self-control, another enthusiasm, and 
so on through the series. It follows that music may 


222 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


be judged not merely by the pleasure it gives, but by 
the character of its moral influence; pleasure, in- 
deed, is essential or there would be no art; but the 
different kinds of pleasure given by different kinds 
of music are to be distinguished not merely by quan- 
tity, but by quality. One will produce a right pleas- 
ure of which the good man will approve, and which 
will have a good effect on character, another will be 
in exactly the opposite case. Or, as Plato puts it, 
‘the excellence of music is to be measured by pleas- 
ure. But the pleasure must not be that of chance 
persons; the fairest music is that which delights the 
best and best educated, and especially that which 
delights the one man who is pre-eminent in virtue 
and education.” ? 

We see then that even pure music, to the Greeks, 
had a distinct and definite ethical bearing. But 
this ethical influence was further emphasized by the 
fact that it was not their custom to enjoy their music 
pure. What they called ‘‘music,’” as has been al- 
ready pointed out, was an intimate union of melody, 
verse and dance, so that the particular emotional 
meaning of the rhythm and tune employed was 
brought out into perfect lucidity by the accompany- 
ing words and gestures. Thus we find, for example, 
that Plato characterizes a tendency in his own time 
to the separation of melody and verse as a sign of 
a want of true artistic taste; for, he says, it is very 
hard, in the absence of words, to distinguish the 
exact character of the mood which the rhythm and 


1 Plato, Laws, II. 658 e—Translated by Jowett. 


+ 


MUSIC AND THE DANCE 223 


tune is supposed to represent. In this connection it 
may be interesting to refer to the use of the “(eit- 
motiv” in modern music. Here too a particular 
idea, if not a particular set of words, is associated 
with the particular musical phrase; the intention of 
the practice being clearly the same as that which is 
indicated in the passage just quoted, namely to add 
precision and definiteness to the vague emotional 
content of pure music. 

And this determining effect of words was further 
enhanced, in the music of the Greeks, by the addi- 
tional accompaniment of the dance. The emotional; 
character conveyed to the mind by the words and. 
to the ear by the tune, was further explained to the 
eye by gesture, pose, and beat of foot; the com- 
bination of the three modes of expression forming 
thus in the Greek sense a single ‘imitative’ art. 
The dance as well as the melody came thus to have 
a definite ethical significance; “‘it smitates,’ says 
Aristotle, “character, emotion, and action.” And 
Plato in his ideal republic would regulate by law the 
dances no less than the melodies to be employed, 
distinguishing them too as morally good or morally 
bad, and encouraging the one while he forbids the 
other. 

The general Greek view of music which has thus 
been briefly expounded, the union of melody and 
rhythm with poetry and the dance in view of a 
definite and consciously intended ethical character, 
may be illustrated by the following passage of 
Plutarch, in which he describes the music in vogue 
at Sparta. The whole system, it will be observed, 


224 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


is designed with a view to that military courage 
which was the virtue most prized in the Spartan 
state, and the one about which all their institutions 
centred. Music at Sparta actually was, what Plato 
would have had it in his ideal republic, a public and 
state-regulated function; and even that vigorous 
race which of all the Greeks came nearest to being 
Philistines of virtue, thought fit to lay a foundation 
purely esthetic for their severe and soldierly ideal. 

“Their instruction in music and verse,” says 
Plutarch, “was not less carefully attended to than 
their habits of grace and good-breeding in conversa- 
tion. And their very songs had a life and spirit in 
them that inflamed and possessed men’s minds with 
an enthusiasm and ardour for action; the style of 
them was plain and without affectation; the subject 
always serious and moral; most usually, it was in 
praise of such men as had died in defence of their 
country, or in derision of those that had been 
cowards; the former they declared happy and 
glorified; the life of the latter they described as 
most miserable and abject. There were also vaunts 
of what they would do and boasts of what they had 
done, varying with the various ages; as, for example, 
they had three choirs in their solemn festivals, the 
first of the old men, the second of the young men, 
and the last of the children; the old men began 
thus: 


“We once were young and brave and strong;’ 


the young men answering them, singing: 


MUSIC AND THE DANCE 225 


“““And we’re so now, come on and try:’ 
the children came last and said: 
“But we’ll be strongest by-and-by.’ 


“Indeed, if we will take the pains to consider their 
compositions, and the airs on the flute to which they 
marched when going to battle, we shall find that 
Terpander and Pindar had reason to say that music 
and valour were allied.” 4 

The way of regarding music which is illustrated in 
this passage, and in all that is said on the subject by 
Greek writers, is so typical of the whole point of 
view of the Greeks, that we may be pardoned for 
insisting once again on the attitude of mind which it 
implies. Music, as we saw, had an ethical value to 
the Greeks; but that is not to say that they put the 
ethics first, and the music second, using the one as a 
mere tool of the other. Rather an ethical state of 
mind was also, in their view, a musical one. In a 
sense something more than metaphorical, virtue was 
a harmony of the soul. The musical end was thus 
identical with the ethical one. The most beautiful 
music was also the morally best, and vice versa; 
virtue was not prior to beauty, nor beauty to virtue; 
they were two aspects of the same reality, two ways 
of regarding a single fact; and if esthetic effects 
were supposed to be amenable to ethical judgment, 
it was only because ethical judgments at bottom 


1 Plutarch, “Lycurgus,” ch. 21 (Clough’s Edition). 


226 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


were esthetic. The “good” and the “beautiful” 
were one and the same thing; that is the first and 
last word of the Greek ideal. 

And while thus, on the one hand, virtue was in- 
vested with the spontaneity and delight of art, on 
the other, art derived from its association with ethics 
emotional precision. In modern times the end of 
music is commonly conceived to be simply and with- 
out more ado the excitement of feeling. Its value is 
measured by the intensity rather than the quality of 
the emotion which it is capable of arousing; and the 
auditor abandons himself to a casual succession of 
highly wrought moods as bewildering in the actual 
experience as it is exhausting in the after-effects. 
In Greek music, on the other hand, if we may trust 
our accounts, while the intensity of the feeling ex- 
cited must have been far less than that which it is 
in the power of modern instrumentation to evoke, 
its character was perfectly simple and definite. 
Melody, rhythm, gesture and words, were all con- 
sciously adapted to the production of a single pre- 
cisely conceived emotional effect; the listener was 
in a position clearly to understand and appraise the 
value of the mood excited in him; instead of being 
exhausted and confused by a chaos of vague and 
conflicting emotion he had the sense of relief which 
accompanies the deliverance of a definite passion, 
and returned to his ordinary business “purged,” as 
they said, and tranquillized, by a process which he 
understood, directed to an end of which he ap- 
proved. 


POETRY . 227 


§ 5. PorTtRY 


It now, as we have seen, in the plastic arts, and in 
an art which appears to us so pure as music, the 
Greeks perceived and valued, along with the imme- 
diate pleasure of beauty, a definite ethical character 
and bent, much more was this the case with poetry, 
whose material is conceptions and ideas. The works 
of the poets, and especially of Homer, were in fact 
to the Greeks all that moral treatises are to us; or 
rather, instead of learning their lessons in abstract 
terms, they learnt them out of the concrete repre- 
sentation of life. Poetry was the basis of their | 
education, the guide and commentary of their prac- 
tice, the inspiration of their speculative thought. If 
they have a proposition to advance, they must back > 
it by a citation: if they have a counsel to offer, they 
must prop it with a verse. Not only for delight, but 
for inspiration, warning and example, they were 
steeped from childhood onwards in an ocean of 
melodious discourse; their national epics were to 
them what the Bible was to the Puritans; and for 
every conjunction of fortune, for every issue of home 
or state, they found therein a text to prompt or 
reinforce their decision. Of this importance of 
poetry in the life of ancient Greece, and generally 
of the importance of music and art, the following 
passage from Plato is a striking illustration: ‘““When 
the boy has learned his letters and is beginning to 
understand what is written, as before he understood 
only what was spoken, they put into his hands the 


228 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


works of great poets, which he reads at school; in 
these are contained many admonitions, and many 
tales, and praises, and encomia of ancient famous 
men, which he is required to learn by heart, in order 
that he may imitate or emulate them and desire to 
become like them. Then again the teachers of the 
lyre take similar care that their young disciple is 
temperate and gets into no mischief; and when they 
have taught him the use of the lyre, they introduce 
him to the poems of other excellent poets, who are 
the lyric poets; and these they set to music and 
make their harmonies and rhythms quite familiar to 
the children’s souls, in order that they may learn to 
be more gentle and harmonious and rhythmical, and 
so more fitted for speech and action; for the life of 
man in every part has need of harmony and 
rhythm.” 4 

From this conception of poetry as a storehouse of 
practical wisdom the transition is easy to a purely 
ethical judgment of its value; and that transition, as 
has been already noted, was actually made by Plato, 
who even goes so far as to prescribe to poets the 
direct inculcation of such morals as are proper to a 
tract, as that the good and just man is happy even 
though he be poor, and the bad and unjust man 
miserable even though he be rich. This didacticism, 
no doubt, is a parody; but it is a parody of the 
normal Greek view, that the excellence of a poem is 
closely bound up with the compass and depth of its 
whole ethical content, and is not to be measured, as 


1Plato, Prot., 325 c.—Translated by Jowett. 


POETRY 229 


e 


many moderns maintain, merely by the esthetic 
beauty of its form. When Strabo says, “it is impos- 
sible to be a good poet unless you are first a good 
man,” he is expressing the common opinion of the 
Greeks that the poet is to be judged not merely as 
an artist but as an interpreter of life; and the same 
pre-supposition underlies the remark of Aristotle 
that poets may be classified according as the char- 
acters they represent are as good as, better, or worse 
than the average man. 

But perhaps the most remarkable illustration of 
this way of regarding poetry is the passage in the 
“Frogs” of Aristophanes, where the comedian has 
introduced a controversy between A‘schylus and 
Euripides as to the relative merit of their works, and 
has made the decision turn almost entirely on moral 
considerations, the question being really whether or 
no Euripides is to be regarded as a corrupter of his 
countrymen. In the course of the discussion Ats- 
chylus is made to give expression to a view of 
poetry which clearly enough Aristophanes endorses 
himself, and which no doubt would be accepted by 
the majority of his audience. He appeals to all 
antiquity to show that poets have always been the 
instructors of mankind, and that it is for this that 
they are held in honour. 


‘Took to traditional history, look 

To antiquity, primitive, early, remote; 

See there, what a blessing illustrious poets 
Conferr’d on mankind, in the centuries past. 
Orpheus instructed mankind in religion, 

Reclaim’d them from bloodshed and barbarous rites; 


230 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


Musaeus deliver’d the doctrine of med’cine, 

And warnings prophetic for ages to come; 

Next came old Hesiod, teaching us husbandry, 
Ploughing, and sowing, and rural affairs, 

Rural economy, rural astronomy, 

Homely morality, labour, and thrift; 

Homer himself, our adorable Homer, 

What was his title to praise and renown? 

What, but the worth of the lessons he taught us, 
Discipline, arms, and equipment of war?’ 


While, then, there is, as we should naturally ex- 
pect, plenty of Greek poetry which is simply the 
spontaneous expression of passionate feeling, unre- 
strained by the consideration of ethical or other 
ends; yet if we take for our type (as we are fairly 
entitled to do, from the prominent place it held in 
Greek life), not the lyrics but the drama of Greece, 
we shall find that in poetry even (as was to be ex- 
pected) to a higher degree than in music and the 
plastic arts, the beauty sought and achieved is one 
that lies within the limits of certain definite moral 
pre-suppositions. Let us consider this point in some 
detail; and first let us examine the character of 
Greek tragedy. 


§ 6. TRAGEDY 


The character of Greek tragedy was determined 
from the very beginning by the fact of its connection 
with religion. The season at which it was per- 
formed was the festival of Dionysius; about his al- 


1 Aristoph., Frogs, 1030.—Translated by Frere. 


\ 


TRAGEDY 231 


tar the chorus danced; and the object of the per- 
formance was the representation of scenes out of 
the lives of ancient heroes. The subject of the| 
drama was thus strictly prescribed; it must be se- | 
lected out of a cycle of legends familiar to the audi- | 
ence; and whatever freedom might be allowed to 
the poet in his treatment of the theme, whatever the 
reflections he might embroider upon it, the specu- 
lative or ethical views, the criticism of contemporary 
life, all must be subservient to the main object orig- 
inally proposed, the setting forth, for edification as 
well as for delight, of some episodes in the lives of 
those heroes of the past who were considered not 
only to be greater than their descendants, but to be 
the sons of gods and worthy themselves of worship 
as divine. 

By this fundamental condition the tragedy of the 
Greeks is distinguished sharply, on the one hand 
from the Shakespearian drama, on the other from 
the classical drama of the French. The tragedies 
of Shakespeare are devoid, one might say, or at 
least comparatively devoid, of all preconceptions. 
He was free to choose what subject he liked and to 
treat it as he would; and no sense of obligation to 
religious or other points of view, no feeling for tra- 
ditions descended from a sacred past and not lightly 
to be handled by those who were their trustees for 
the future, sobered or restrained for evil or for good 
his half-barbaric genius. He flung himself upon life 
with the irresponsible ardour of the discoverer of a 
new continent; shaped and re-shaped it as he chose, 
carved from it now the cynicism of Measure for 


232 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


Measure, now the despair of Hamlet and of Lear, 
now the radiant magnanimity of the Tempest, and 
departed leaving behind him not a map or chart, but 
. a series of mutually incompatible landscapes. 

What Shakespeare gave, in short, was a many- 
_ sided representation of life; what the Greek drama- 
_ tist gave was an interpretation. But an interpreta- 
tion not simply personal to himself, but representa- 
_ tive of the national tradition and belief. The men 
whose deeds and passions he narrated were the pat- 
terns and examples on the one hand, on the other the 
warnings of his race; the gods who determined the 
fortunes they sang, were working still among men; 
the moral laws that ruled the past ruled the present 
too; and the history of the Hellenic race moved, 
under a visible providence, from its divine origin 
onward to an end that would be prosperous or the 
reverse according as later generations should con- 
tinue to observe the worship and traditions of their 
fathers descended from heroes and gods. 

And it is the fact that in this sense it was repre- 
sentative of the national consciousness, that distin- 
guishes the Greek tragedy from the classical drama 
of the French. For the latter, though it imitated 
the ancients in outward form, was inspired with a 
totally different spirit. The kings and heroes whose 
fortunes it narrated were not the ancestors of the 
French race; they had no root in its affections, no 
connection with its religious beliefs, no relation to its 
ethical conceptions. The whole ideal set forth was 
not that which really inspired the nation, but at best 
that which was supposed to inspire the court; and 


TRAGEDY 255 


the whole drama, like a tree transplanted to an alien 
soil, withers and dies for lack of the nourishment 
which the tragedy of the Greeks unconsciously im- 
bibed from its encompassing air of national tra- 
dition. 

Such, then, was the general character of the Greek 
tragedy—an interpretation of the national ideal. 
Let us now proceed to follow out some of the conse- 
quences involved in this conception. 

In the first place, the theme represented is the life 
and fate of ancient heroes—of personages, that is 
to say, greater than ordinary men, both for good and 
for evil, in their qualities and in their achievements, 
pregnant with fateful issues, makers or marrers of 
the fortunes of the world. Tragic and terrible their 
destiny may be, but never contemptible or squalid. 
Behind all suffering, behind sin and crime, must lie 
a redeeming magnanimity. A complete villain, says 
Aristotle, is not a tragic character, for he has no hold 
upon the sympathies; if he prosper, it is an outrage 
on common human feeling; if he fall into disaster, 
it is merely what he deserves. Neither is it admis- 
sible to represent the misfortunes of a thoroughly 
good man, for that is merely painful and distressing; 
and least of all is it tolerable gratuitously to intro- 
duce mere baseness, or madness, or other aberra- 
tions from human nature. The true tragic hero is 
a man of high place and birth who having a nature 
not ignoble has fallen into sin and pays in suffering 
the penalty of his act. Nothing could throw more 
light on the distinguishing characteristics of the 
Greek drama than these few remarks of Aristotle, 


234 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


and nothing could better indicate how close, in the 
Greek mind, was the connection between esthetic 
and ethical judgments. The canon of Aristotle 
would exclude as proper themes for tragedy the 
character and fate, say, of Richard III.—the abso- 
lutely bad man suffering his appropriate desert; or 
of Kent and Cordelia—the absolutely good, brought 
into unmerited affliction; and that not merely be- 
cause such themes offend the moral sense, but be- 
cause by so offending they destroy the proper pleas- 
ure of the tragic art. The whole esthetic effect is 
limited by ethical pre-suppositions; and to outrage 
these is to defeat the very purpose of tragedy. 
Specially interesting in this connection are the 
strictures passed on Euripides in the passage of the 
“Frogs” of Aristophanes to which allusion has al- 
ready been made. Euripides is there accused of 
lowering the tragic art by introducing—what? 
Women in love! The central theme of modern 
tragedy! It is the boast of A‘schylus that there is 
not one of his plays which touches on this subject: 


“T never allow’d of your lewd Sthenoboeas 

Or filthy detestable Phaedras—not I! 

Indeed I should doubt if my drama throughout 
Exhibit an instance of woman in love!” ? 


And there can be little doubt that with a Greek 
audience this would count to him as a merit, and 
that the shifting of the centre of interest by Euripi- 
des from the sterner passions of heroes and of 


1 Aristoph. Frogs, 1043.—Translated by Frere. 


TRAGEDY 23.5 


kings to this tenderer phase of human feeling would 
be felt even by those whom it charmed to be a de- 
clension from the height of the older tragedy. 
And to this limitation of subject corresponds a 
limitation of treatment. The Greek tragedy is com- 
posed from a definite point of view, with the aim not 
merely to represent but also to interpret the theme. 
Underlying the whole construction of the plot, the 
dialogue, the reflections, the lyric interludes, is the 
intention to illustrate some general moral law, some 
common and typical ‘problem, some fundamental 
truth. Of the elder dramatists at any rate, Aéschy- 
lus and Sophocles, one may even say that it was their 
purpose—however imperfectly achieved—to “‘justify 
the ways of God to man.” To represent suffering as 
the punishment of sin is the constant bent of Aéschy- 
lus; to justify the law of God against the presump- 
tion of man is the central idea of Sophocles. In 
either case the whole tone is essentially religious. 
To choose such a theme as Lear, to treat it as 
Shakespeare has treated it, to leave it, as it were, 
bleeding from a thousand wounds, in mute and help- 
less entreaty for the healing that is never to be 
vouchsafed—this would have been repulsive, if not 
impossible, to a Greek tragedian. Without ever de- 
scending from concrete art to the abstractions of 
mere moralizing, without ever attempting to substi- 
tute a verbal formula for the full and complex per- 
ception that grows out of a representation of life, 
the ancient dramatists were nevertheless, in the 
whole apprehension of their theme, determined by a 
more or less conscious speculative bias; the world 


236 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


to them was not merely a splendid chaos, it was a 
divine plan; and even in its darkest hollows, its 
passes most perilous and bleak, they have their hand, 
though doubtful perhaps and faltering, upon the clue 


that is to lead them up to the open sky. 


It is consonant with this account of the nature of 


Greek tragedy that it should have laid more stress 
‘upon action than upon character. The interest was 


centred on the universal bearing of certain acts and 
situations, on the light which the experience repre- 
sented threw on the whole tendency and course of 
human life, not on the sentiments and motives of the 
particular personages introduced. The characters 
are broad and simple, not developing for the most 
part, but fixed, and fitted therefore to be the me- 
diums of direct action, for simple issues, and typical 
situations. In the Greek tragedy the general point 
of view predominates over the idiosyncrasies of par- 
ticular persons. It is human nature that is repre- 
sented in the broad, not this or that highly special- 
ized variation; and what we have indicated as the 
general aim, the interpretation of life, is never ob- 
scured by the predominance of exceptional and, so 
to speak, accidental characteristics. Man is the 
subject of the Greek drama; the subject of the mod- 
ern novel is Tom and Dick. 

Finally, to the realization of this general aim, the 
whole form of the Greek drama was admirably 
adapted. It consisted very largely of conversations 
between two persons, representing two opposed 
points of view, and giving occasion for an almost 
scientific discussion of every problem of action raised 


TRAGEDY 237 


in the play; and between these conversations were 
inserted lyric odes in which the chorus commented 
on the situation, bestowed advice or warning, praise 
or blame, and finally summed up the moral of the 
whole. Through the chorus, in fact, the poet could 
speak in his own person, and impose upon the whole 
tragedy any tone which he desired. Periodically he 
could drop the dramatist and assume the preacher; 
and thus ensure that his play should be, what we 
have seen was its recognized ideal, not merely a rep- 
resentation but an interpretation of life. 

But this without ceasing to be a work of art. In 
attempting to analyze in abstract terms the general 
character of the Greek tragedy we have necessarily 
thrown into the shade what after all was its primary 
and most essential aspect; an aspect, however, of 
which a full appreciation could only be attained not 
by a mere perusal of the text, but by what is un- 
fortunately for ever beyond our power, the witness- 
ing of an actual representation as it was given on 
the Greek stage. For from a purely esthetic point 
of view the Greek drama must be reckoned among 
the most perfect of art forms. 

Taking place in the open air, on the sunny slope 
of a hill, valley and plain or islanded sea stretching 
away below to meet the blazing blue of a cloudless 
sky, the moving pageant, thus from the first set in 
tune with nature, brought to a focus of splendour 
the rays of every separate art. More akin to an 
opera than to a play, it had, as its basis, music. 
For the drama had developed out of the lyric ode, 
and retained throughout what was at first its only 


238 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


element, the dance and song of a mimetic chorus. 
By this centre of rhythmic motion and pregnant 
melody the burden of the tale was caught up and 
echoed and echoed again, as the living globe divided 
into spheres of answering song, the clear and precise 
significance of the plot, never obscure to the head, 
being thus brought home in music to the passion of 
the heart, the idea embodied in lyric verse, the verse 
transfigured by song, and song and verse reflected 
as in a mirror to the eye by the swing and beat of 
the limbs they stirred to consonance of motion. 
And while such was the character of the odes that 
broke the action of the play, the action itself was an 
appeal not less to the ear and to the eye than to the 
passion and the intellect. The circumstances of the 
representation, the huge auditorium in the open air, 
lent themselves less to “acting” in our sense of the 
term, than to attitude and declamation. The actors 
raised on high boots above their natural height, their 
faces hidden in masks and their tones mechanically 
magnified, must have relied for their effects not upon 
facial play, or rapid and subtle variations of voice 
and gesture, but upon a certain statuesque beauty of 
pose, and a chanting intonation of that majestic 
iambic verse whose measure would have been ob- 
scured by a rapid and conversational delivery. The 
representation would thus become moving sculpture 
to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep of music 
between the intenser interludes of the chorus; and 
the spectator without being drawn away by an 
imitative realism from the calm of impassioned con- 
templation into the fever and fret of a veritable 


TRAGEDY 239 


+ 


actor on the scene, received an impression based 
throughout on that clear intellectual foundation, 
that almost prosaic lucidity of sentiment and plot, 
which is preserved to us in the written text, but 
raised by the accompanying appeal to the sense, 
made as it must have been made by such artists as 
the Greeks, by the grouping of forms and colours, 
the recitative, the dance and the song, to such a 
greatness and height of esthetic significance as can 
hardly have been realized by any other form of art 
production. 

The nearest modern analogy to what the ancient 
drama must have been is to be found probably in the 
operas of Wagner, who indeed was strongly in- 
fluenced by the tragedy of the Greeks. It was his 
ideal, like theirs, to combine the various branches of 
art, employing not only music but poetry, sculpture, 
painting and the dance, for the representation of his 
dramatic theme; and his conception also to make 
art the interpreter of life, reflecting in a national 
drama the national consciousness, the highest action 
and the deepest passion and thought of the German 
race. To consider how far in this attempt he falls 
short of or goes beyond the achievement of the 
Greeks, and to examine the wide dissimilarities that 
underlie the general identity of aim, would be to 
wander too far afield from our present theme. But 
the comparison may be recommended to those who 
are anxious to form a concrete idea of what the effect 
of a Greek tragedy may have been, and to clothe in 
imagination the dead bones of the literary text with 
the flesh and blood of a representation to the sense. 


240 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


Meantime, to assist the reader to realize with 
somewhat greater precision the bearing of the fore- 
going remarks, it may be worth while to give an out- 
line sketch of one of the most celebrated of the 
Greek tragedies, the “Agamemnon” of Atschylus. 

The hero of the drama belongs to that heroic 
house whose tragic history was among the most 
terrible and the most familiar to a Greek audience. 
Tantalus, the founder of the family, for some offence 
against the gods, was suffering in Hades the punish- 
ment which is christened by his name. His son 
Pelops was stained with the blood of Myrtilus. Of 
the two sons of the next generation, Thyestes se- 
duced the wife of his brother Atreus; and Atreus in 
return killed the sons of Thyestes, and made the 
father unwittingly eat the flesh of the murdered 
boys. Agamemnon, son of Atreus, to propitiate 
Artemis, sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia, and in 
revenge was murdered by Clytemnestra, his wife. 
And Clytemnestra was killed by Orestes, her son, in 
atonement for the death of Agamemnon. For gen- 
erations the race had been dogged by crime and pun- 
ishment; and in choosing for his theme the murder 
of Agamemnon the dramatist could assume in his 
audience so close a familiarity with the past history 
of the House that he could call into existence by an 
allusive word that sombre background of woe to en- 
hance the terrors of his actual presentation. The 
figures he brought into vivid relief joined hands with 
menacing forms that faded away into the night of 
the future and the past; while above them hung, in- 
toning doom, the phantom host of Furies. 


TRAGEDY 241 


+ 


Yet at the outset of the drama all promises well. 
The watchman on the roof of the palace, in the tenth 
year of his watch, catches sight at last of the signal 
fire that announces the capture of Troy and the 
speedy return of Agamemnon. With joy he pro- 
claims to the House the long-delayed and welcome 
news; yet even in the moment of exultation lets slip 
a doubtful phrase hinting at something behind, 
which he dares not name, something which may turn 
to despair the triumph of victory. Hereupon enter 
the chorus of Argive elders, chanting as they move to 
the measure of a stately march. They sing how ten 
years before Agamemnon and Menelaus had led 
forth the host of Greece, at the bidding of the Zeus 
who protects hospitality, to recover for Menelaus 
Helen his wife, treacherously stolen by Paris. 
Then, as they take their places and begin their rhyth- 
mic dance, in a strain of impassioned verse that is at 
once a narrative and a lyric hymn, they tell, or 
rather, present in a series of vivid images, flashing 
as by illumination of lightning out of a night of 
veiled and sombre boding, the tale of the deed that 
darkened the starting of the host—the sacrifice of 
Iphigenia to the goddess whose wrath was delaying 
the fleet at Aulis. In verse, in music, in pantomime, 
the scene lives again—the struggle in the father’s 
heart, the insistence of his brother chiefs, the piteous 
glance of the girl, and at last the unutterable end; 
while above and through it all rings like a knell of 
fate the refrain that is the motive of the whole 
drama: 


“Sing woe, sing woe, but may the Good prevail.” 


242 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


At the conclusion of the ode enters Clytemnestra. 
She makes a formal announcement to the chorus of 
the fall of Troy; describes the course of the signal- 
fire from beacon to beacon as it sped, and pictures 
in imagination the scenes even then taking place in 
the doomed city. On her withdrawal the chorus 
break once more into song and dance. To the music 
of a solemn hymn they point the moral of the fall of 
Troy, the certain doom of violence and fraud de- 
scended upon Paris and his House. Once more the 
vivid pictures flash from the night of woe—Helen 
in her fatal beauty stepping lightly to her doom, the 
widower’s nights of mourning haunted by the ghost 
of love, the horrors of the war that followed, the 
slain abroad and the mourners at home, the change 
of living flesh and blood for the dust and ashes of 
the tomb. At last with a return to their original 
theme, the doom of insolence, the chorus close their 
ode and announce the arrival of a messenger from 
Troy. Talthybius, the herald, enters as spokesman 
of the army and King, describing the hardships they 
have suffered and the joy of the triumphant issue. 
To him Clytemnestra announces, in words of which 
the irony is patent to the audience, her sufferings in 
the absence of her husband and her delight at the 
prospect of his return. He will find her, she says, 
as he left her, a faithful watcher of the home, her 
loyalty sure, her honour undefiled. Then follows 
another choral ode, similar in theme to the last, 
dwelling on the woe brought by the act of Paris 
upon Troy, the change of the bridal song to the 
trump of war and the dirge of death; contrasting, in 


TRAGEDY 243 


¢ 


a profusion of splendid tropes, the beauty of Helen 
with the curse to which it is bound; and insisting 
once more on the doom that attends insolence and 
pride. At the conclusion of this song the measure 
changes to a march, and the chorus turn to welcome 
the triumphant king. Agamemnon enters, and be- 
hind him the veiled and silent figure of a woman. 
After greeting the gods of his House, the King, in 
brief and stilted phrase, acknowledges the loyalty 
of the chorus, but hints at much that is amiss which 
it must be his first charge to set right. Hereupon 
enters Clytemnestra, and in a speech of rhetorical 
exaggeration tells of her anxious waiting for her 
lord and her inexpressible joy at his return. In 
conclusion she directs that purple cloth be spread 
upon his path that he may enter the house as befits 
a conqueror. After a show of resistance, Agamem- 
non yields the point, and the contrast at which the 
dramatist aims is achieved. With the pomp of an 
eastern monarch, always repellent to the Greek 
mind, the King steps across the threshold, steps, as 
the audience knows, to his death. The higher the 
reach of his power and pride the more terrible and 
swift is the nemesis; and Clytemnestra follows in 
triumph with the enigmatic cry upon her lips: 
“Zeus, who art god of fulfilment, fulfil my prayers.” 
As she withdraws the chorus begin a song of boding 
fear, the more terrible that it is still indefinite. 
Something is going to happen—the presentiment is 
sure. But what, but what? They search the night 
in vain. Meantime, motionless and silent, waits the 
figure of tbe veiled woman. It is Cassandra, the 


244 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


prophetess, daughter of Priam of Troy, whom Aga- 
memnon has carried home as his prize. Clytem- 
nestra returns to urge her to enter the house; she 
makes no sign and utters no word. The Queen 
changes her tone from courtesy to anger and re- 
buke; the figure neither stirs nor speaks; and Cly- 
temnestra at last with an angry threat leaves her 
and returns to the palace. Then, and not till then, 
a cry breaks from the stranger’s lips, a passionate 
cry to Apollo who gave her her fatal gift. All the 
sombre history of the House to which she had been 
brought, the woe that has been and the woe that is 
to come, passes in pictures across her inner sense. 
In a series of broken ejaculations, not sentences but 
lyric cries, she evokes the scenes of the past and of 
the future. Blood drips from the palace; in its 
chambers the Furies crouch; the murdered sons of 
Thyestes wail in its haunted courts; and ever among 
the visions of the past that one of the future floats 
and fades, clearly discerned, impossible to avert, the 
murder of a husband by a wife; and in the rear of 
that, most pitiful of all, the violent death of the seer 
who sees in vain and may not help. Between 
Cassandra and the Chorus it is a duet of anguish 
and fear; in the broken lyric phrases a phantom 
music wails; till at last, at what seems the breaking- 
point, the tension is relaxed, and dropping into the 
calmer iambic recitative, Cassandra tells her mes- 
sage in plainer speech and clearly proclaims the 
murder of the King. Then, with a last appeal to 
the avenger that is to come, she enters the palace 
alone to meet her death—The stage is empty. 


TRAGEDY 245 


tt 


Suddenly a cry is heard from within; again, and 
then again; while the chorus hesitate the deed is 
done; the doors are thrown open, and Clytemnestra 
is seen standing over the corpses of her victims. 
All disguise is now thrown off; the murderess 
avows and triumphs in her deed; she justifies it as 
vengeance for the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and sees in 
herself not a free human agent but the incarnate 
curse of the House of Tantalus. And now for the 
first time appears the adulterer AXgisthus, who has 
planned the whole behind the scenes. He too is an 
avenger, for he is the son of that Thyestes who was 
made to feed on his own children’s flesh. The mur- 
der of Agamemnon is but one more link in the long 
chain of hereditary guilt; and with that exposition 
of the pitiless law of punishment and crime this 
chapter of the great drama comes to a close. But 
the “Agamemnon” is only the first of a series of 
three plays closely connected and meant to be per- 
formed in succession; and the problem raised in the 
first of them, the crime that cries for punishment 
and the punishment that is itself a new crime, is 
solved in the last by a reconciliation of the powers 
of heaven and hell, and the pardon of the last of- 
fender in the person of Orestes. To sketch, how- 
ever, the plan of the other dramas of the triology 
would be to trespass too far upon our space and 
time. It is enough to have illustrated, by the ex- 
ample of the “Agamemnon,” the general character 
of a Greek tragedy; and those who care to pursue 
the subject further must be referred to the text of 
the plays themselves. 


246 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


§ 7. COMEDY 


Even more remarkable than the tragedy of the 
Greeks, in its rendering of a didactic intention un- 
der the forms of a free and spontaneous art, is the 
older comedy known to us through the works of 
Aristophanes. As the former dealt with the general 
conceptions, religious and ethical, that underlay the 
Greek view of life, using as its medium of exposition 
the ancient national myths, so the latter dealt with 
the particular phases of contemporary life, em- 
ploying the machinery of a free burlesque. The 
achievement of Aristophanes, in fact, is more as- 
tonishing, in a sense, than that of Aéschylus. Start- 
ing with what is always, prima facie, the prose of 
everyday life, its acrid controversies, its vulgar and 
tedious types, and even its particular individuals— 
for Aristophanes does not hesitate to introduce his 
contemporaries in person on the stage—he fits to 
this gross and heavy stuff the wings of imagination, 
scatters from it the clinging mists of banality and 
spite, and speeds it forth through the lucid heaven 
of art amid peals of musical laughter and snatches 
of lyric song. For Aristophanes was a poet as well 
as a comedian, and his genius is displayed not only 
in the construction of his fantastic plots, not only 
in the inexhaustible profusion of his humane and 
genial wit, but in bursts of pure poetry as melodious 
and inspired as ever sprang from the lips of the 
lyrists of Greece or of the world. The basis of the 
comic as of the tragic art of the Greeks was song 


COMEDY 247 


and dance; and the chorus, the original element of 
the play, still retains in the works of Aristophanes 
a place important enough to make it clear that in 
comedy, too, a prominent aspect of the art must 
have been the esthetic appeal to the ear and the 
eye. In general structure, in fact, comedy and 
tragedy were alike; esthetically the motives were 
similar, only they were set in a different key. 

But while primarily Aristophanes, like the trage- 
dians, was a great artist, he was also, like them, a 
great interpreter of life. His dramas are satires as 
well as poems, and he was and expressed himself 
supremely conscious of having a “‘mission”’ to fulfil. 
“He has scorned from the first,” he makes the 
chorus sing of himself in the “Peace’’: 


‘He has scorned from the first to descend and to dip 
Peddling and meddling in private affairs: 

To detect and collect every petty defect 

Of husband and wife and domestical life; 

But intrepid and bold, like Alcides of old, 

When the rest stood aloof, put himself to the proof 
In his country’s behoof.” + 


His aim, in fact, was deliberately to instruct his 
countrymen in political and social issues; to attack 
the abuses of the Assembly, of the Law-courts and 
the home; to punish demagogues, charlatans, pro- 
fessional politicians; to laugh back into their senses 
“revolting” sons and wives; to defend the orthodox 
faith against philosophers and men of science. 
These are the themes that he embodies in his plots, 


1 Aristoph. Peace, 751 seqg—Translated by Frere. 


248 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


and these the morals that he enforces when he 
speaks through the chorus in his own person. And 
the result is an art-product more strange to the 
modern mind in its union of poetry with prose, of 
esthetic with didactic significance, than even that 
marvellous creation, the Greek tragedy. Of the 
character of this comedy the reader may form an 
‘ idea through the admirable and easily accessible 
translations of Frere,) and we are therefore dis- 
pensed from the obligation to attempt, as in the 
case of tragedy, an account of some particular 
specimen of the art. 


§ 8. SUMMARY 


And here must conclude our survey of the char- 
acter of Greek art. The main point which we have 
endeavoured to make clear has been so often insisted 
upon, that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon it 
further. The key to the art of the Greeks, as well 
as to their ethics, is the identification of the beauti- 
ful and the good; and it therefore is as natural in 
treating of their art to insist on its ethical value as 
it was to insist on the esthetic significance of their 
moral ideal. But, in fact, any insistence on either 
side of the judgment is misleading. ‘The two points 
of view had never been dissociated; and art and 
conduct alike proceeded from the same imperative 
impulse, to create a harmony or order which 
was conceived indifferently as beautiful or good. 


*In Morley’s Universal Library. 


COMEDY 249 


Through and through, the Greek ideal is Unity. 
To make the individual at one with the state, the 
real with the ideal, the inner with the outer, art with 
morals, finally to bring all phases of life under the 
empire of a single idea, which, with Goethe, we may 
call, as we will, the good, the beautiful, or the whole 
—this was the aim, and, to a great extent, the 
achievement of their genius. And of all the points 
of view from which we may envisage their brilliant 
activity none perhaps is more central and more 
characteristic than this of art, whose essence is the 
comprehension of the many in the one, and the per- 
fect reflection of the inner in the outer. 


CHAPTER V 
CONCLUSION 


OW that we have examined in some detail the 

most important phases of the Greek view of 
life, it may be as well to endeavour briefly to re- 
capitulate and bring to a point the various consid- 
erations that have been advanced. 

But, first, one preliminary remark must be made. 
Throughout the preceding pages we have made no 
attempt to distinguish the Greek “view” from the 
Greek “ideal”; we have interpreted their customs 
and institutions, political, social, or religious, by the 
conceptions and ideals of philosophers and poets, 
and have thus, it may be objected, made the mis- 
take of identifying the blind work of popular in- 
stinct with the theories and aspirations of conscious 
thought. 

Such a procedure, no doubt, would be illegitimate 
if it were supposed to imply that Greek institutions 
were the result of a deliberate intention consciously 
adopted and approved by the average man. Like 
other social products they grew and were not made; 
and it was only the few who realized fully all that 
they implied. But on the other hand it is a dis- 
tinguishing characteristic of the Greek age that the 


ideal formulated by thought was the direct. outcome 
250 


CONCLUSION 251 


of the facts. That absolute separation of what 
ought to be from what is which continues to haunt 
and yitiate.modern life had not yet been made in 
ancient Greece. Plato, idealist though he be, is yet 
rooted in the facts of his age; his perfect republic 
he bases on the institutions of Sparta and Crete; 
his perfect man he shapes on the lines of the Greek 
citizen. That dislocation of the spirit which op- 
posed the body to the soul, heaven to earth, the 
church to the state, the man of the world to the 
priest, was alien to the normal consciousness of the 
Greeks. To them the world of fact was also the 
world of the ideal; the conceptions which inspired 
their highest aims were already embodied in their 
institutions and reflected in their life; and the real- 
ization of what ought to be involved not the destruc- 
tion of what was, but merely its perfecting on its 
own lines. 

While, then, on the one hand, it would be ridicu- 
lous so to idealize the civilization of the Greeks as 
to imply that they had eliminated discord and con- 
fusion, yet, on the other hand, it is legitimate to say 
that they had built on the plan of the ideal, and that 
their life both in public and private was, by the very 
law of its existence, an effort to realize explicitly 
that type of Good which was already implicitly em- 
bodied in its structure. et 

The ideal, in a word, in ancient Greece, was or- 
ganically related to the real; and that is why it is 
possible to identify the Greek view with the Greek 
ideal. 

Bearing this in mind we may now proceed to 


one 


252 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


recapitulate our conclusions as to what that view 
was. And first, let us take the side of speculation. 
Here we are concerned not with the formal systems 
of Greek thought, but with that half-unconscious 
working of imagination as much as of mind whose 
expression was their popular religion. Of this 
religion, as we saw, the essential feature was that 
belief in anthropomorphic gods, by virtue of which 
a reconciliation was effected between man and the 
powers whether of nature or of his own soul. Be- 
hind phenomena, physical or psychic, beings were 
conceived of like nature with man, beings, there- 
fore, whose actions he could interpret and whose 
motives he could comprehend. For his imagination, 
if not for his intellect, a harmony was thus induced 
between himself and the world that was not he. A 
harmony! and in this word we have the key to the 
dominant idea of the Greek civilization. 

For, turning now to the practical side, we find the 
same impulse to reconcile divergent elements. That 
antithesis of soul and body which was emphasized 
in the medizval view of life and dominates still our 
current ethical conceptions, is foreign to the Greek 
view of life. Their ideal for the individual included 
the perfection of the body; beauty no less than 
goodness was the object of their quest, and they be- 
lieved that the one implied the other. But since the 
perfection of the body required the co-operation of 
external aids, they made these also essential to their 
ideal. Not merely virtue of the soul, not merely 
health and beauty of the body, but noble birth, 
sufficient wealth and a good name among men, were 


CONCLUSION 253 
included in their conception of the desirable life. 
Harmony, in a word, was the end they pursued, 
harmony of the soul with the body and of the body 
with its environment; and it is this that distinguishes 
their ethical ideal from that which in later times has 
insisted on the fundamental antagonism of the inner 
to the outer life, and made the perfection of the 
spirit depend on the mortification of the flesh. 

The same ideal of harmony dominates the Greek 
view of the relation of the individual to the state. 
This relation, it is true, is often described as one in 
which the parts were subordinated to the whole; but 
more accurately it may be said that they were con- 
ceived as finding in the whole their realization. The 
perfect individual was the individual in the state; 
the faculties essential to his excellence had there 
only their opportunity of development; the qualities 
defined as virtues had there only their significance; 
and it was only in so far as he was a citizen that a 
man was properly a man at all. Thus that apposi-_ 
tion between the individual and the state which per- 
plexes our own society had hardly begun to define it- 
self in Greece. If on the one hand the state made 
larger claims on the liberty of the individual, on the 
other, the liberty of the individual consisted in a re- 
sponse to the claims. So that in this department 
also harmony was maintained by the Greeks between 
elements which have developed in modern times 
their latent antagonism. 

Thus, both in speculation and in practice, in his 
relation to nature and in his relation to the state, 
both internally, between the divergent elements of 


254 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


which his own being was composed, and externally 
between himself and the world that was not he, it 
was the aim, conscious or unconscious, and, in part 
at least, the achievement of the Greeks, to create and 
maintain an essential harmony. The antitheses of 
which we in our own time are so painfully and 
increasingly aware, between Man as a moral being 
and Nature as an indifferent law, between the flesh 
and the spirit, between the individual and the state, 
do not appear as factors in that dominant conscious- 
ness of the Greeks under whose influence their reli- 
gion, their institutions and their customary ideals 
had been formed. And so regarded, in general, un- 
der what may fairly be called its most essential as- 
pect, the Greek civilization is rightly described as 
that of harmony. 

But, on the other hand, and this is the point to 
which we must now turn our attention, this harmony 
which was the dominant feature in the consciousness 
of the Greeks and the distinguishing characteristic 
of their epoch in the history of the world, was never- 
theless, after all, but a transitory and imperfect at- 
tempt to reconcile elements whose antagonism was 
too strong for the solution thus proposed. ‘The fac- 
tors of disruption were present from the beginning 
in the Greek ideal; and it was as much by the de- 
velopment of its own internal contradictions as by 
the invasion of forces from without that that fabric 
of magical beauty was destined to fall. These con- 
tradictions have already been indicated at various 
points in the text, and it only remains to bring them 
together in a concluding summary. 


CONCLUSION 255 


On the side of speculation, the religion of the 
Greeks was open, as we saw, to a double criticism. 
On the one hand, the ethical conceptions embodied 
in those legends of the gods which were the product 
of an earlier and more barbarous age, had become to 
the contemporaries of Plato revolting or ridiculous. 
On the other hand, to metaphysical speculation, not 
only was the existence of the gods unproved, but 
their mutually conflicting activities, their passions 
and their caprice, were incompatible with that con- 
ception of universal law which the developing rea- 
son evolved as the form of truth. The reconciliation 
of man with nature which had been effected by the 
medium of anthropomorphic gods was a harmony 
only to the imagination, not to the mind. Under 
the action of the intellect the unstable combination 
was dissolved and the elements that had been thus 
imperfectly joined fell back into their original op- 
position. ‘The religion of the Greeks was destroyed 
by the internal evolution of their own consciousness. 

And in the sphere of practice we are met with a 
similar dissolution. The Greek conception of ex- 
cellence included, as we saw, not only bodily health 
and strength, but such a share at least of external 
goods as would give a man scope for his own self- 
perfection. And since these conditions were not 
attainable by all, the sacrifice of the majority to the 
minority was frankly accepted and the pursuit of the 
ideal confined to a privileged class. 

Such a conception, however, was involved in in- 
ternal contradictions. For in the first place, even 
for the privileged few, an excellence which depended 


256 THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 


on external aids was, at the best, uncertain and 
problematical. Misfortune and disease were possi- 
bilities that could not be ignored; old age and death 
were imperative certainties; and no care, no art, no 
Organization of society, could obviate the inherent 
incompatibility of individual perfection with the 
course of nature. Harmony between the individual 
and his environment was perhaps more nearly 
achieved by and for the aristocracy of ancient Greece 
than by any society of any other age. But such a 
harmony, even at the best, is fleeting and precarious; 
and no perfection of life delivers from death. 

And, in the second place, to secure even this im- 
perfect realization, it was necessary to restrict the 
universal application of the ideal. Excellence, in 
Greece, was made the end for some, not for all. But 
this limitation was felt, in the development of con- 
sciousness, to be self-contradictory; and the next 
great system of ethics that succeeded te that of 
Aristotle, postulated an end of action that should be 
at once independent of the aids of fortune and open 
alike to all classes of mankind. The ethics of a 
privileged class were thus expanded into the ethics 
of humanity; but this expansion was fatal to its es- 
sence, which had depended on the very limitations 
_ by which it was destroyed. 
| With the Greek civilization beauty perished from 
' the world. Never again has it been possible for man 
to believe that harmony is in fact the truth of all 
existence. The intellect and the moral sense have 
developed imperative claims which can be satisfied 
by no experience known to man. And as a conse- 


CONCLUSION | 257 


quence of this the goal of desire which the Greeks 
could place in the present, has been transferred, for 
us, to a future infinitely remote, which nevertheless 
is conceived as attainable. Dissatisfaction with the 
world in which we live and determination to realize 
one that shall be better, are the prevailing charac- 
teristics of the modern spirit. The development is 
one into whose meaning and end this is not the 
place to enter. It is enough that we feel it to be 
inevitable; that the harmony of the Greeks contained 
in itself the factors of its own destruction; and that 
in spite of the fascination which constantly fixes our 
gaze on that fairest and happiest halting-place in the 
secular march of man, it was not there, any more 
than here, that he was destined to find an ultimate 
reconciliation and repose. 





INDEX 


A. 


Achilles, 7, 33, 185 

ZEschylus, on the punishment 
of guilt, 25; on Zeus, 53; 
and Euripides, 229; his Aga- 
memnon, 240 

Agamemnon, the, of A%schylus, 
240 

Alcibiades, and Socrates, 187 

Andromache, 173 

Apollo, Delphian, 12, 29; in 
Euripides, 48 

Aristophanes, 20, 46; on physi- 
cal speculations, 56; on com- 
munism, 94; on Athenian 
democracy, 117; on women, 
175; on Aéschylus and Eu- 
ripides, 229, 234; character 
of his comedies, 247 

Aristotle, his view of the state, 
75; on slaves, 78; on forms 
of government, 86, 93; on 
property, 100; his ideal of 
the state, 131; on artisans, 
138; on happiness, 139; on 
virtue, 147; on_ pleasure, 
157; on women, 175; on 
painting, 217; on music, 221; 
on the dance, 223; on the 
tragic hero, 233 

Artisans, 76, 138 

Aspasia, 182 

Athens, 111 

Athletics, 142 


B. 
Bacchic rites, 30 


259 


C. 
Citizen, Greek conception of, 
71 


City-state, 69 

Cleomachus, 188 

Cleon, 116 

Comedy, 246 

Communism, in Aristophanes, 
94; in Plato, 98 

Croesus, 140 


D. 


Dancing, 223 

Demosthenes, on law, 74, 127; 
on Athenian demagogues, 
124; on sycophants, 125; on 
marriage, 171, 183 

Dionysius, 30; Zagreus, 31, 40 

Divination, 18 


E. 


Education, in Sparta, 105; by 
poetry, 227 

Erinyes, 25 

Euripides, his criticism of the 
myths, 48; on slaves, 81; on 
Athens, 113; on women, 
176-181; and A®schylus, 229 


F, 


Family, the, 170 
Festivals, 13 
Friendship, 184 


G. 


Goethe, on Greek sepulchra 
‘monuments, 37 


260 


rs 


Hector, 173 

Herodotus, 109, 140 
Heroes, 10, 15 

Hetzrea, 182 

Homer, 6, 21, 43, 172-175 


1 
Ischomachus, 158, 179 


is 
Lycurgus, 94, 97, 104, 110 


M. 


Marriage, at Sparta, 104, 169; 
in Plato and Aristotle, 170; 
at Athens, 171; Xenophon 
on, 172 

Mimnermus, 34 

Music, 218; at Sparta, 224 

Mysteries, 40 


N. 


Nature, impersonation of pow- 
ers of, 3; and law, 75; treat- 
ment of, in art, 212 

Nausicaa, 174 


O. 


Odysseus, 4, 33, 34, 172 
Olympia, 143 

Oracles, 20 

Orestes, 27, 48 


\'y 


Painting, 213 

Panathenea, 13 

Parrhasius, 218 

Parthenon, frieze of, 13, 217 

Patroclus, 7, 185 

Penelope, 172 

Pericles, funeral oration, 36, 
176 

Pindar, 40, 47, 140 


GREEK VIEW 


Plato, on mendicant prophets, 
23, 39; on inspiration, 29, 
207; on the myths, 51; his 
metaphysics, 62, 63; _ his 
ideal state, 72, 130; on trade, 
84, 98; his communism, 99; 
his scale of Goods, 140; on 
body and soul, 143; on vir- 
tue, 147; myth of the two 
horses, 151; on_ pleasure, 
156; on Socrates, 161; de- 
scription of a gymnasium, 
165; on women, 170, 175, 
179; on love, 189; on art, 
207, 209; on music, 218, 222; 
on the dance, 223; on poetry 
oe a means of education, 
22 


Plutarch, on Sparta, 107, 109; 
on friendship, 187; on music 
at Sparta, 224 


Poetry, 227 
Puritanism, 17, 23, 28, 147 
4 
Science, and religion, in 
Greece, 56 


Sculpture, 213 
Shakespeare, 231, 235 
Slaves, 76 

Socrates, 158-163, 187 
Solon, 97, 140, 141 
Sophocles, 54 

Sparta, 103, 184, 224 
Stoicism, 202 


hs 


Theban band, 184 

Theognis, 186 

Thucydides, on factions, 88; 
on Athens and Sparta, 113; 
on Athens, 120 

Tragedy, 230 


W. 
Wagner, 239 


GREEK VIEW 261 


‘* Woman, 169; in the Homeric machus, 158; on marriage, 
age, 172 170; his ideal of a wife, 179 
X. Z. 


Xenophon, on the mechanical Zeus, 43, 53; of Pheidias, 144, 
arts, 138; account of Ischo- 214 








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